ACT V.

THE VILLAGE OF SHULAM.

(_The_ SHULAMITE, _who has escaped from the seraglio is carried in by her

lover._)

CHORUS OF VILLAGERS

Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her

beloved?

THE SHEPHERD

(_to the_ SHULAMITE.)

I awake thee under the apple tree.

(_He points to the house._)

There thou wert born.

THE SHULAMITE

Set me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thine arm; for love is

strong as death, jealousy cruel as the grave; the flashes thereof are

flashes of fire, a very flame of the Lord. But many waters cannot quench

love, nor can the floods drown it. The man who seeks to purchase it

acquires but contempt.

EPILOGUE.

A COTTAGE AT SHULAM.

FIRST BROTHER OF THE SHULAMITE

(_thinking of a younger sister whom he would sell when she is older._)

We have a little sister, still immature. What shall we do with her when

she is spoken for?

SECOND BROTHER

If by then she is comely, we will get for her silver from a palace. If

she is not comely, we will get the value of cedar boards.

THE SHULAMITE

(_ironically intervening._)

I am comely, yet I made them let me be.

FIRST BROTHER

(_significantly._)

Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon. He leased it to farmers each of

whom was to pay him a thousand pieces of silver.

THE SHULAMITE

But my vineyard which is mine I still have.

(_Laughing._)

A thousand pieces for thee, Solomon, and two hundred for the others.

(_At the door the_ SHEPHERD _appears. Behind him are comrades._)

THE SHEPHERD

Fair one, that dwelleth here, my companions hearken to thy voice, cause

me to hear it.

THE SHULAMITE

Hasten to me, my beloved. Hasten like a roe or a young hart on the

mountains of spices.

III

APHRODITE URANIA

Greece had many creeds, yet but one religion. That was Beauty. Israel

believed in hate, Greece in love. In Judaea the days of the righteous were

long. In Greece they were brief. Whom the gods loved died young. The gods

themselves were young. With the tribes that took possession of the

Hellenic hills they came in swarms. Sprung from the depths of the archaic

skies, they were sombre and impure. When they reached Olympus already

their Asiatic masks had fallen. Hecate was hideous, Hephaestos limped, but

among the others not an imperfection remained. Divested of attributes

monstrous and enigmatic, they rejuvenated into divinities of joy. Homer

said that their laughter was inextinguishable. He joined in it. So did

Greece. The gayety of the immortals was appreciated by a people that

counted their years by their games.

As the tribes dispersed the gods advanced. Their passage, marked here by a

temple, there by a shrine, had always the incense of legends. These Homer

gathered and from them formed a Pentateuch in which dread was replaced by

the ideal. Divinities, whom the Assyrian priests barely dared to invoke by

name, and whose mention by the laity was forbidden, he displayed, luminous

and indulgent, lifting, as he did so, the immense burden of mystery and

fear under which humanity had staggered. Homer turned religion into art,

belief into poetry. He evolved a creed that was more gracious than

austere, more aesthetic perhaps than moral, but which had the signal merit

of creating a serenity from which contemporaneous civilization proceeds.

Greece to-day lies buried with her gods. She has been dead for twenty

centuries and over. But the beauty of which she was the temple existed

before death did and survived her.

To Homer beauty was an article of faith. But not the divinities that

radiated it. He laughed at them. Pythagoras found him expiating his mirth

in hell. A later echo of it bubbled in the farce of Aristophanes. It

reverberated in the verses of Euripides. It rippled through the gardens of

Epicurus. It amused sceptics to whom the story of the gods and their

amours was but gossip concerning the elements. They believed in them no

more than we do. But they lived among a people that did. To the Greeks the

gods were real, they were neighborly, they were careless and caressing,

subject like mortals to fate. From them gifts came, desires as well. The

latter idea, precocious in its naive psychology, eliminated human

responsibility and made sin descend from above.

Olympus was not severe. Greece was not, either. The solemnity of other

faiths had no place in her creed, which was free, too, of their baseness.

It was not Homer only, but the inherent Hellenic love of the beautiful

that, in emancipating her from Orientalisms, maintained her in an attitude

which, while never ascetic, occasionally was sublime. The tradition of

Orpheus and Eurydice, the fable of Psyche and her god, had in them love,

which nowhere else was known. They had, too, something of the high

morality which the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ depict.

In the _Iliad_ a thousand ships are launched for the recovery of an

abducted wife. The subject is equivocal, but concerning it there is not a

dubious remark. In the _Iliad_ as in the _Odyssey_ love rested on two

distinct principles: First, the respect of natural law; second, the

respect of lawful marriage. These principles, the gods, if they willed,

could abolish. When they did, their victims were not blamed, they were

pitied. Christianity could not do better. Frequently it failed to do as

well. But the patricists were not psychologists and the theory of

determinism had not come.

Aphrodite had. With love for herald, with pleasure for page, with the

Graces and the Hours for handmaids, she had come among the dazzled

immortals. Hesiod told about it. So did de Musset.

Regrettez-vous le temps ou le Ciel, sur la terre,

Marchait et respirait dans un peuple de dieux?

Ou Venus Astarte, fille de l'onde amere,

Secouait, vierge encor, les larmes de sa mere,

Et fecondait le monde en tordant ses cheveux!

But Astarte was a stone which Aphrodite's eyes would have melted. It may

be that they did. The worship of the Dea Meretrix was replaced by the

purer rites of this purer divinity, unconscious as yet of the names and

shames of Ishtar.

The Aphrodite whom Homer revealed differed from that of Hesiod. In Hesiod

she was still a novice, but less austere than she afterward appeared in

the conceptions of Pheidias. The latter succeeded in detaining the

fluidity of the gods. He reproduced them in stone, sometimes in gold,

always in beauty. He created a palpable Olympus. To die without seeing it

was thought a great calamity. The universal judgment of antiquity was that

art could go no higher. At the sight of the Pheidian Zeus, a barbarian

brute, AEmilius Paulus, the Roman invader and victor, shrank back, awe

struck, smitten with sacred terror. The image was regarded less as a

statue than as an actual revelation of the divine. To have been able to

display it, the general assumption was that either Pheidias had ascended

above, or else that Zeus had descended to him. The revelation of Aphrodite

Urania which he effected for her temple near the Cerameicus must have been

equally august, the celestial in its supremest expression.

Thereafter the decadence of the goddess began. Previously she had ruled

through her perfection. Subsequently, though the perfection persisted, the

stamp of divinity ceased. In lieu of the goddess was a very pretty woman.

If that woman did not, as Hesiod claimed, issue from the sea, she at least

emerged from marble. The statues differed. Sometimes there were doves on

them, sometimes there was a girdle embroidered with caresses and kisses,

at times in the hand was an arrow, at others a lance, again Aphrodite was

twisting her hair. But chiefly she was assassinated, not like Lais by

jealous wives, but by sheer freedom of the chisel. It was these profaner

images that inflamed Phaedra and Pasiphae. Among them was Praxiteles'

Cnidian Aphrodite, a statue which a king tried vainly to buy and a madman

offered to marry. The Pheidian Aphrodite belonged to an epoch in which art

expressed the eternal; the Praxitelean, to a period in which it suggested

the fugitive. One was beauty and also love, the other was beauty and

passion.

Originally both were one. It was only the idea of her that varied. Each

Hellenic town, each upland and valley had its own faiths, its own myths.

Uniformity concerning them was not doctrinal, it was ritualistic. Then,

too, Aphrodite, Apollo, Zeus himself, the whole brilliant host of Olympus

were once monsters of Asia. However august they had since become, memories

and savors of anterior rites followed in their ascensions. These things

incited them to resume their primal forms. It was pleasurably that they

acceded. Therein is the simple mystery of their double lives, the reason

why Aphrodite could be degrading and ideal, celestial and vulgar, yet

always Philommeis, Queen of Smiles. In Cythera and Paphos she was but a

fresh avatar of Ishtar. In other sites she resembled the picture that

Dante made of Fortune and which an artist detached.

"Dante," said Saint-Victor, "displays Fortune turning her wheel,

distributing good and evil, success and failure, prosperity and want.

Mortals upbraid and accuse her. 'But these she does not hear. Tranquil

among primordial things, she turns her sphere and ineffably rejoices.' So

does Venus indifferently dispense high aims and viciousness. Curses do not

reach her, insults do not touch her, the passions she has unchained

cannot rise to where she is. In her high place tranquilly she turns her

sphere of stars.

'Volge sua sfera e beata si gode.'"

It was not that serene divinity, it was the more human Aphrodite of

Hesiod, that disturbed the Argive Helen. The story of her, the story of

the golden fruit tossed into Olympus with its tag, To the Fairest, the

rivalries that resulted, the decision of Paris, corrupt yet just, his

elopement with Helen, and the war of the world which ensued, these

episodes the hexameters of the _Iliad_ unfold.

There, drenched with blood and bathed in poetry, is Helen. There, too, is

Paris on his scarlet prow. With them you go from Lacedaemon, past the

faint, fair rose of Ida's snow, over the green plain of waters, right to

the gates of Ilium and within, and see how each man stopped and stood and

mused at Helen's face and her undreamed-of beauty.

Her beauty was no doubt surprising. She trailed admiration but also

respect. Homer relates that the seated sages rose at her approach. They

did not blame her for the conflagration that her face had caused. They

knew, as Priam knew, that responsibility rested not with the woman but

with the gods. Perhaps she was not responsible. As in an allegory of

beauty which itself is for all and yet for none, already she had passed

from hand to hand. When she was but a child she had been abducted.

Theseus took her from a temple in which she was dancing. Recovered by her

brothers, Achilles got her from them but only to cede her to Patroclus.

Later she became the wife of Menelaus. Subsequently Aphrodite gave her to

Paris. At that she rebelled. But no mortal may resist the divine. Helen

accompanied Paris to Troy, where, during the war that was waged for her,

he was killed and she remained in his brother's arms until recovered by

Menelaus.

Quintus Smyrnaeus[4] represented Menelaus, sword in hand, rushing violently

at her. A glance of her eyes disarmed him. In the clatter of the falling

sword was love's reawakening. Then presently, as an honored wife, she

returned to Lacedaemon. Even there her adventures continued. Achilles,

haunted in Hades by the memory of her beauty, escaped, and in mystic

nuptials conceived with her a winged child, Euphorion. Clearly, as the

sages thought and Priam believed, she could not have been responsible. Nor

was she so regarded. The various episodes of her career formed a sort of

sacred legend for the polluting of which a poet, Stesichorus, was blinded.

The blindness of Homer, Plato attributed to the same cause. To degrade

beauty is a perilous thing. To preserve it, to make the legend more

sacred still, it was imagined that not Helen, but a phantom of her,

accompanied Paris to Troy, and that it was for a phantom that men fought

and died.

A thousand years later Apollonius of Tyana happened on that romance.

Apollonius knew all languages, including that of silence, and all things,

save the caresses of women. He knew, too, how to summon the dead. To

verify the story, he evoked the shade that once before for Helen had

emerged from hell. Apollonius asked: "Is it true that Helen went to Troy?"

"We thought so," Achilles answered, "and we fought to get her back. But

she was actually in Egypt. When we discovered that we fought for Troy

itself."[5]

Achilles may have been right. In the _Odyssey_, in connection with Helen,

mention is made of nepenthe. Nepenthe was an Egyptian drug that dispelled

the memory of whatever is sad. Helen had much to forget and probably did,

even without assistance. She was the personification of passivity. Her

little rebellion at Aphrodite was very brief. But, assuming the nepenthe,

it has been assumed also that in it was the secret of the spell with which

she so promptly disarmed Menelaus. To modern eyes his attitude is

ambiguous. His complaisance has an air of complicity. But Menelaus lived

in an heroic age. Moreover, when Sarah vacated the palace of the

Pharaohs, the complaisance of Abraham was the same.

In both instances the principle involved was one of ownership. In

patriarchal and heroic days woman was an asset. She was the living money

of the period. Agamemnon, in devising how he might calm the anger of

Achilles, offered him a quantity of girls. They were so much current coin.

When stolen, recovery was the owner's chief aim. What may have happened in

the interim was a detail, better appreciable when it is remembered that

booty was treated, as Helen at Ilium was treated, in the light of Paris'

lawful wife; for robbery at that time was a highly legitimate mode of

acquiring property, provided and on condition that the robber and the

robbed were foes. The idea of enticing the property was too complicated

for the simplicity of those days. It was in that simplicity, together with

the belief that whatever occurred was attributable to the gods, that the

morality of the epoch resided.

In the story of Paris and Helen the morality of Aphrodite is as ambiguous

as the attitude of Menelaus. She has the air of an _entremetteuse_. But

her purpose was not to favorize frailty. Her purpose was the exercise of

her sovereign pleasure. Paris, in adjudging to her the prize of beauty,

became the object of her special regard, his people became her people,

their enemies her own. The latter prevailed, but that was because

Destiny--to whose power the gods themselves had to yield--so willed.

In the _Odyssey_ the morality of the _Iliad_ is enhanced. The enchantments

of Calypso, the sorceries of Circe, the seductions of sirens, long years

themselves, wanderings over perilous seas, dangers, hardships,

temptations, failed to divert Odysseus from his memories of Penelope, who

in turn resisted every suitor for his sake. When the later philosophy of

Greece inquired what was woman at her best, it answered its own question

in looking back at her. A thousand years after she had been sung, Horace,

writing to Lollius, said: "I have been re-reading the poet of the Trojan

War. No one has told so well as he what is noble and what is base." St.

Basilius, writing later still, declared that the Homeric epics were a

perpetual praise of right. The fact, he noted, was particularly obvious in

the passage in which Odysseus confronted Nausicaa.

That little princess, historically the first who washed household linen in

public, was, when so engaged, surprised by the shipwrecked hero. Instead

of being alarmed at the appearance of this man whom the waters had

disrobed, she was conscious only of a deep respect. St. Basilius gives the

reason. In default of clothing Homer had dressed him in virtue.[6]

The deduction is so pleasant that the views of the saint concerning Circe

and Calypso would be of interest. But they are unrecorded. It may be that

he had none. The enchantresses themselves with their philters and

enthralments are supposedly fabulous. Yet in the Homeric account of their

seas, once thought to be but a dream of fairyland, mariners have found a

log book of Mediterranean facts so accurate that a pilot's guide is but a

prose rendering of its indications.[7] As with the seas so with the

sirens. Their enchantments were real.

At an epoch when women generally were but things, too passively

indifferent and too respectfully obedient to care to attempt, even could

they have divined how, to captivate, Circe and Calypso displayed the then

novel lures of coquetry and fascination. In the charm of their voices, in

the grace of their manners, in the harmony of their dress, in the perfume

of their lips, in their use of unguents, in their desire to please joined

to the high art of it, was a subtlety of seduction so new and unimagined

that it was magical indeed. In the violent _Iliad_, women, hunted like

game, were but booty. In the suaver _Odyssey_ was their revenge. It was

they who captured and detained, reducing the hardiest heroes into servants

of their pleasure. It is reasonable that their islands should have been

thought enchanted and they enchantresses.

The story of their spells, of their refinements, and of their consequent

dominations, exerted gradually an influence wide and profound. Women began

to conjecture something else than marriage by right of might. Into the

conjecturings came attempts at emancipation that preoccupied husbands and

moralists. Hesiod denounced the new ambitions, and, finding denunciation

perhaps ineffective, employed irony. He told of Pandora who, fashioned

first out of clay, afterward adorned with a parure of beauty, was then

given perfidy, falsehood and ruse, that, in being a delight to man, she

should be also a disaster.[8]

The picture, interesting in its suggestion of Eve, was originally perhaps

a Chaldaean curio, imported by Phoenician traders. Its first Hellenic

setting was due probably to Orpheus, the great lost poet of love, whose

songs charmed all nature, all hell as well. From him, through problematic

hands, it drifted to Hesiod, as already his lyre had drifted to Lesbos.

The picture persisted, the lyre as well. To the latter the Mitylenes

attributed the wonder of the beauty of their nightingales, chief among

whom was Sappho.

IV

SAPPHO

Sappho was contemporaneous with Nebuchadnezzar. While he was chastening

the Jews, she was creating love. In her day the condition of Hellenic

women differed from what it had been. Generally they were shut apart,

excluded from any exercise of their possible minds, restricted to strict

domesticity. At Athens a girl might not so much as look from a window. If

she did, she saw nothing. The window did not give on the street. But in

the temples the candor of her eyes was violated. In the festivals of Ceres

the modesty of her ears was assailed. Otherwise, she was securely guarded.

If, to her detriment, she eluded guardianship, she could be sold. With

marriage she entered into a form of superior slavery. When her husband's

friends supped with him, she was not permitted to be present. Without

permission she could not go from one apartment to the next. Without

permission she could not go out. When she did, it was at her husband's

side, heavily veiled. With his permission, she might go to the theatre,

but only when tragedy was given. At comedies and at the games she was

forbidden to assist. In case of disobedience the penalty was death.

Pleasures and privileges were limited to housekeeping and motherhood. At

the immanence of the latter her surroundings were embellished with

beautiful trifles, with objects of art, with whatever influences might

prenatally affect, and, in affecting, perfect the offspring. Otherwise,

her existence was simple and severe. The peplos tissue of gold was not for

her. Garments colored or flowered were not, either. These were reserved

for her inferiors and superiors, for the hierodules of Aphrodite Pandemos

and the images of the gods. Though her robes were simple, they had to be

heavy. If light, a fine was incurred. If they did not hang properly,

another fine was imposed. If, to the detriment of her husband, a man

succeeded in approaching her, she could be killed or merely repudiated; in

the latter case, she could no longer enter a temple, any one might insult

her. Still a slave, she was an outcast as well.

Such were the laws. Their observance is a different matter. In

Aristophanes and the comic poets generally Athenian women of position were

dissolute when they were not stupid, and usually they were both. They may

have been. But poets exaggerate. Besides, divorce was obtainable. Divorce

was granted on joint request. On the demand of the husband it could be

had. In the event of superscandalous conduct on his part, it was granted

to the wife, provided she appeared before a magistrate and personally

demanded it. The wife of the wicked and winning Alcibiades went on such an

errand. Alcibiades met her, caught her in his arms and, to the applause of

the wittiest people in the world, carried her triumphantly home.

Aristophanes and Alcibiades came in a later and more brilliant epoch. In

the days of Sappho severity was the rigorous rule, one sanctioned by the

sentiment of a people in whose virile sports clothing was discarded, and

in whose plays jest was too violent for delicate ears.

In Sparta the condition of women was similar, but girls had the antique

freedom which Nausicaa enjoyed. Destined by the belligerent constitution

of Lacedaemon to share, even in battle, the labors of their brothers, they

devoted themselves, not to domesticity, but to physical development. They

wrestled with young men, raced with them, swam the Eurotas, preparing

themselves proudly and purely to be mothers among a people who destroyed

any child that was deformed, fined any man that presumed to be stout,

forced debilitated husbands to cede their wives to stronger arms, and who,

meanwhile, protected the honor of their daughters with laws of which an

infraction was death.

The marriage of Spartan girls was so arranged that during the first years

of it they saw their husbands infrequently, furtively, almost

clandestinely, in a sort of hide-and-go-seek devised by Lycurgus in order

that love, instead of declining into indifference, should, while

insensibly losing its illusions, preserve and prolong its strength.

Otherwise, the Spartan wife became subject to the common Hellenic custom.

Her liberty departed with her girlhood. Save her husband, no man might see

her, none could praise her, none but he could blame. Her sole jewels were

her children. Her richest garments were stoicism and pride. "What dower

did you bring your husband?" an Athenian woman asked of one of them.

"Chastity," was the superb reply.[9]

Lesbos differed from Lacedaemon. The Spartans declared that they knew how

to fight, not how to talk. They put all their art into not having any. The

Lesbians put theirs into the production of verse. At Mitylene, poetic

development was preferred to physical culture. The girls there thought

more of immortality than of motherhood. But the unusual liberty which they

enjoyed was due to influences either Boeotian or Egyptian, perhaps to

both. Egypt was neighborly. With Lesbos, Egypt was in constant

communication. The liberty of women there, as generally throughout the

morning lands, religion had procured. Where Ishtar passed, she fevered,

but also she freed. Beneath her mantle women acquired a liberty that was

very real. On the very sites in which Islam was to shut them up,

Semiramis, Strantonice, Dido, Cleopatra, and Zenobia appeared. Isis, who

was Ishtar's Egyptian avatar, was particularly liberal. Among the cities

especially dedicated to her was Naucratis.

Charaxus, a brother of Sappho, went there, met Rhodopis, a local beauty,

and fell in love with her. Charaxus was a merchant. He brought wine to

Egypt, sold it, returned to Greece for more. During one of his absences,

Rhodopis, while lolling on a terrace, dropped her sandal which, legend

says, a vulture seized, carried away, and let fall into the lap of King

Amasis. The story of Cinderella originated there. With this difference:

though the king, after prodigal and impatient researches, discovered the

little foot to which the tiny sandal belonged, Rhodopis, because of

Charaxus, disassociated herself from his advances. Subsequently a young

Naucratian offered a fortune to have relations with her. Because of

Charaxus, Rhodopis again refused. The young man dreamed that she

consented, dreamed that she was his, and boasted of the dream.

Indignantly Rhodopis cited him before the magistrates, contending that he

should pay her as proposed. The matter was delicate. But the magistrates

decided it with great wisdom. They authorized Rhodopis to dream that she

was paid.

Rumors of these and of similar incidents were probably reported in Lesbos

and may have influenced the condition of women there. But memories of

Boeotia from which their forefathers came was perhaps also a factor.

Boeotia was a haunt of the muses. In the temple to them, which Lesbos

became, the freedom of Erato was almost of necessity accorded to her

priestesses.

Lesbos was then a stretch of green gardens and white peristyles set

beneath a purple dome. To-day there is no blue bluer than its waters.

There is nothing so violet as the velvet of its sky. With such accessories

the presence of Erato was perhaps inevitable. In any case it was profuse.

Nowhere, at no time, has emotional aestheticism, the love of the lovely,

the fervor of individual utterance, been as general and spontaneous as it

was in this early Academe.

In the later Academe at Athens laughter was prohibited. That of Mitylene

was less severe. To loiter there some familiarity with the magnificence of

Homer may have been exacted, but otherwise a receptive mind, appreciative

eyes, and kissable lips were the best passports to Sappho, the girl Plato

of its groves, who, like Plato, taught beauty, sang it as well and with it

the _glukupikros_--the bitterness of things too sweet.

Others sang with her. Among those, whose names at least, the fates and the

Fathers have spared us, were Erinna and Andromeda. Sappho cited them as

her rivals. One may wonder could they have been really that. Plato called

Sappho the tenth muse. Solon, after hearing one of her poems, prayed that

he might not die until he had learned it. Longinus spoke of her with awe.

Strabo said that at no period had any one been known who in any way,

however slight, could be compared to her.

Though twenty-five centuries have gone since then, Sappho is still

unexceeded. Twice only has she been approached; in the first instance by

Horace, in the second by Swinburne, and though it be admitted, as is

customary among scholars, that Horace is the most correct of the Latin

poets, as Swinburne is the most faultless of our day, Sappho sits and

sings above them atop, like her own perfect simile of a bride:

Like the sweet apple which reddens atop on the topmost bough,

Atop on the topmost twig which the pluckers forgot somehow.

Forget it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.[10]

It is regrettable that one cannot now get Sappho. But of at least nine

books there remain but two odes and a handful of fragments. The rest has

been lost on the way, turned into palimpsests, or burned in Byzance. The

surviving fragments are limited some to a line, some to a measure, some to

a single word. They are the citations of lexicographers and grammarians,

made either as illustrations of the AEolic tongue or as examples of metre.

The odes are addressed, the one to Aphrodite, the other to Anactoria. The

first is derived from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who quoted it as a

perfect illustration of perfect verse. The second was given by Longinus as

an example of the sublime in poetry--of the display, as he put it, not of

one emotion, but of a congress of them. Under the collective title of

_Anactoria_, these odes together with many of the fragments, Swinburne has

interwoven into an exquisite whole.

To appreciate it, Sappho herself should be understood. Her features, which

the Lesbians put on their coins, are those of a handsome boy. On seeing

them one does not say, Can this be Sappho? But rather, This is Sappho

herself. They fit her, fit her verse, fit her fame. That fame, prodigious

in her own day, is serviceable in ours. It has retained the name of

Phaon, her lover; the names of girls for whom she also cared. Of these,

Suidas particularly mentioned Atthis and Gorgo. Regarding Anactoria there

is the testimony of the ode. There is more. "I loved thee once, Atthis,

long ago," she exclaimed in one fragment. In another she declared herself

"Of Gorgo full weary." But the extreme poles of her affection are

supposably represented by Phaon and Anactoria. The ode to the latter is,

apart from its perfection, merely a jealous plaint, yet otherwise useful

in showing the trend of her fancy, in addition to the fact that her love

was not always returned. Of that, though, there is further evidence in the

fragments. Some one she reproached with being "Fonder of girls than

Gello." Elsewhere she said "Scornfuller than thou have I nowhere found."

But even in the absence of such evidence, the episode connected with

Phaon, although of a different order, would suffice.

Contemporaneous knowledge of it is derived from Strabo, Servius,

Palaephatus, and from an alleged letter in one of Ovid's literary

forgeries. According to these writers, Phaon was a good-looking young

brute engaged in the not inelegant occupation of ferryman. In what manner

he first approached Sappho, whether indeed Sappho did not first approach

him, is uncertain. Pliny, who perhaps was credulous, believed that Phaon

had happened on the male root of a seaweed which was supposed to act as a

love charm and that by means of it he succeeded in winning Sappho's rather

volatile heart. However that may be, presently Phaon wearied. It was

probably in these circumstances that the Ode to Aphrodite was written,

which, in Swinburne's paraphrase--slightly paraphrased anew--is as

follows:

I beheld in sleep the light that is

In her high place in Paphos, heard the kiss

Of body and soul that mix with eager tears

And laughter stinging through the eyes and ears;

Saw Love, as burning flame from crown to feet,

Imperishable upon her storied seat;

Clear eyelids lifted toward the north and south,

A mind of many colors and a mouth

Of many tunes and kisses; and she bowed

With all her subtle face laughing aloud,

Bowed down upon me saying, "Who doth the wrong,

Sappho?" But thou--thy body is the song,

Thy mouth the music; thou art more than I,

Though my voice die not till the whole world die,

Though men that hear it madden; though love weep,

Though nature change, though shame be charmed to sleep.

Ah, wilt thou slay me lest I kiss thee dead?

Yet the queen laughed and from her sweet heart said:

"Even he that flees shall follow for thy sake,

And he shall give thee gifts that would not take,

Shall kiss that would not kiss thee" (Yea, kiss me)

"When thou wouldst not"--When I would not kiss thee!

If Phaon heard he did not heed. He took ship and sailed away, to Sicily it

is said, where, it is also said, Sappho followed, desisting only when he

flung at her some gibe about Anactoria and Atthis. In a letter which Ovid

pretended she then addressed to him, she referred to the gibe, but whether

by way of denial or admission, is now, owing to different readings of the

text, uncertain. In some copies she said, quas (the Lesbian girls) _non_

sine crimine (reproach) amavi. In others, quas _hic_ (in Lesbos) sine

crimine amavi. Disregarding the fact that the letter itself is imaginary,

the second reading is to be preferred, not because it is true, but

precisely because it is not. Sappho, though a woman, was a poet. Several

of her verses contain allusions to attributes poetically praised by poets

who never possessed them, and Ovid who had not written a treatise on the

Art of Love for the purpose of displaying his ignorance, was too adroit to

let his imaginary Sappho admit what the real Sappho would have denied.[11]

Meanwhile Phaon refused to return. At Lesbos there was a white rock that

stretched out to the sea. On it was a temple to Apollo. A fall from the

rock was, at the time, locally regarded as a cure for love. Arthemesia,

queen of Caria, whom another Phaon had rebuffed and who, to teach him

better manners, put his eyes out, threw herself from it. Sappho did also.

It cured her of the malady, of all others as well.

Such is the story, such, rather, is its outline, one interesting from the

fact that it constitutes the initial love-tragedy of the Occident, as,

also, because of a climax befitting the singer of the bitterness of things

too sweet.

V

THE AGE OF ASPASIA

"Eros is son of earth and heaven, but persuasion is Aphrodite's daughter."

So Sappho sang. The note, new and true as well, became, as fresh truth

ever does become, revolutionary. Athens heard it. Even Sparta listened.

Corinth and Miletus repeated it in clinging keys.

With the new truth came a new era. Through meditations patient and

prolonged Calypso had succeeded in adding coquetry to love. With a distich

Sappho emancipated it. To the despotism that insisted she suggested the

duty of asking; to the submission that had obeyed she indicated the grace

that grants; yet, posing as barrier between each, the right and liberty of

choice, which already Rhodopis had exacted.

Then the new era came. The gynaeceum was not emptied. Wives were still shut

apart. But elsewhere, with that marvel which Atticism was, came the sense

of personal dignity, the conception of individuality, the theory of

freedom, and, ultimately, in streets where women of position could not

venture unaccompanied and unveiled, they were free to come and go at

will, to mingle with men, to assist at comedies and games, to become what

women are to-day, with this difference, they were more handsome and less

pretty. To a people naturally aesthetic the revolution naturally appealed.

Led by the irresistible authority of beauty, for support it had the

sovereign prestige of the muse.

In stooping to conquer, Erato smiled, supplying, as she did so, another

conception, one as novel as the first, the idea that, after all, though

love is a serious thing, the mingling of a little gayety in it is not

forbidden. It was to Anacreon that Erato offered that chord, threw it

rather, laughing, in his face. The poet, laughing too, took and plucked it

lightly, producing quick airs, conceits of pleasure and of wine. When

Sappho sang, it was with all her fervent soul. When she loved it was with

all her fervid heart. She sang as the nightingales of Lesbos sang, because

singing was her life, and she sang of love because she could sing of

nothing else. Anacreon did not pretend to sing. He hummed as the bees of

Hymettus hummed, over this flower and over that, indifferent to each,

caring not for them, for their sweets merely, eager to get all he could as

quickly as he might, smacking his faunesque lips over the grape,

staggering with a hiccough along the lanes of love, trailing among them

strophes to Bacchus rather than to Eros, yet managing to combine the two

and leaving finally to the world that chord with its notes of pleasure.

These, mounting behind Sappho's songs, spread through Hellas, creating as

they spread a caste that borrowed from the girl her freedom, from the bard

his wit, and, from the fusion, produced the hetaira.

Hetaira is a term which Sappho applied to her pupils. It means comrade.

But either because it was too elusive for history's detention or too

fragile for its care, it became corrupted, shoved roughly by stupid hands

among the pornai. The latter were the hierodules of Aphrodite Pandemos.

The hetairae were objects of art, patiently fashioned in fastidious

convents, a class of highly educated young women to whom marriage did not

necessarily appeal but to whom liberty was essential, girls "pleasanter,"

Amphis said, "than the wife, for she with the law on her side, can sit in

your house and despise you."

Such an attitude is not enticing. The hetairae were an alterative from it,

and, at the same time, a protest against existing feminine conditions.

These conditions the legislature could not change but the protest the

legislature could and did encourage. While the wife sat contemptuous in

the severe gynaeceum, the hetairae mingled with men, charming them always,

marrying them occasionally, yet only when their own equality and

independence was recognized and conserved.

It was into a union of this kind that Pericles entered with Aspasia. He

never regretted it, though history has affected to regard it as illicit,

and Aspasia as Omphale. The affectation is an injustice. "In all things,"

Pericles said, "a man's life should be as clean as his hands." What

Aspasia said is not recorded. But it is not improbable that she inspired

the remark.

Aspasia was born and educated at Miletus. It was chiefly there and at

Corinth that the hetairae were trained. In these cities, seminaries had

been established where girls rose from studies as serious as those which

the practice of other liberal professions comport. Their instruction

comprised everything that concerned the perfectioning of the body and

everything that related to the embellishment of the mind. In addition to

calisthenics, there were courses in music, poetry, diction, philosophy,

politics, and art. The graduates were admirable. Their beauty was

admirable also. But they were admired less for that than because the study

of every grace had contributed to their understanding of the unique art,

which is that of charming. Charm they exhaled. Gifted and accomplished,

they were the only women with whom an enlightened Greek could converse.

Their attitude was irreproachable, their distinction extreme, and they

differed from other women only in that their manners were more correct.

Plato had one of them for muse. Sophocles another. To Glycera, of whom

Menander wrote, poetry was an insufficient homage, a statue was erected to

her.[12]

These instances, anomalous now, were logical then. To the Greek the gifts

of the gods were more beneficent here than hereafter. Of divine gifts none

was more appreciated and none more allied to the givers than beauty. The

value attached to it, prodigious in peace, was potent in war, potent in

law. At Plataea, Callicrates was numbered among the heroes because of his

looks. For the same reason Philippus, killed in battle, was nobly buried

and worshipped by those who had been his foes. For the same reason Phryne,

charged with high crimes, was acquitted.

At the Eleusinian mysteries, beneath the portico of the temple, before

assembled Athens, Phryne appeared in the guise of Aphrodite rising from

the sea. Charged with parodying the rites, she was summoned before the

Areiopagus. Conviction meant death. But her beauty, which her advocate

suddenly and cleverly disclosed, was her sole defence. It sufficed for

the acquittal of this woman whose statue, the work of Praxiteles, was

placed in the temple at Delphi.

The tomb of a sister had for epitaph: "Greece, formerly invincible, was

conquered and enslaved by the beauty of Lais, daughter of Love, graduate

of Corinth, who here rests in the noble fields of Thessaly." For Thais a

monument was erected. At Tarsus Glycera had honors semi-divine. In Greece,

let a woman be what she might, if beautiful she was deified, if charming

she was adored. In either case she represented vivified aestheticism to a

people at once intellectual and athletic, temperate and rich, a people

who, contemptous of any time-consuming business, supported by a nation of

slaves, possessing in consequence that wide leisure without which the

richest are poor, attained in their brilliant city almost the ideal. They

knew nothing of telegraphs and telephones, but they knew as little of

hypocrisy and cant. Art and aesthetics sufficed.

In Corinthian and Milesian convents aesthetics were taught to girls who,

lifting their fair hands to Aphrodite, prayed that they might do nothing

that should not charm, say nothing that should not please. These studies

and rituals were supplemented in the Academe. There they learned that the

rightful path in love consisted in passing from beautiful manners to

beautiful thoughts, from beautiful thoughts to beautiful aspirations,

from beautiful aspirations to beautiful meditations, and that, in so

passing, they attained wisdom absolute which is beauty supreme.

It would be excessive to fancy that all graduates followed these precepts

and entered with them into the austere regions where Beauty, one and

indivisible, resides. It would be not only excessive but unreasonable.

Manners were proper for all, but for some revenues were better. Those of

Phryne were so ample that she offered to rebuild the walls of Thebes.

Those of Lais were such that she erected temples. But Phryne and Lais came

later, in post-Aspasian days, when Corinth, in addition to schools, had

marts in which beauty was an article of commerce and where pleasure

received the same official encouragement that stoicism had at Sparta. In

the train of Lais, Ishtar followed. It was Alexander that invoked her.

In the age of Pericles and Aspasia, Athens was too aesthetic to heed the

one, too young to know the other. Pallas alone, she who from her crystal

parapets saw and foresaw what the years would bring, could have told.

Otherwise there was then not a shadow on Athens, light only, light that

has never been excelled, light which from high porches, from tinted

peristyles, from gleaming temples, from shining statues, from white

immortals, from hill to sea, from Olympus itself, radiated, revealing in

its intense vibrations the glare of genius at its apogee.

Whatever is beautiful had its apotheosis then. Whatever was superb found

there its home. Athens had risen to her full height. Salamis had been

fought. A handful of athletes had routed Asia. Reverse the picture and the

glare could not have been. Its aurora would have swooned back into

darkness. But such was the luminousness it acquired that one ray, piercing

the mediaeval night, created the Renaissance, art's rebirth, the recall of

antique beauty.

Salamis lifted Greece to the skies. In the return was a new epoch, the

most brilliant the world has known, a brief century packed with the art of

ages, filled to the tips with grace, lit with a light that still dazzles.

It was too fair. Willed by destiny, it menaced the supremacy of the

divine. "But by whom," Io asked, "is Destiny ruled?" "By the Furies," was

the prompt reply.

They were there. From the depths of the archaic skies they were peering,

prepared to pounce. After one war, another. After the rout of incoherent

Persia, a duel between Athens and Sparta, a duel of jealousy, feminine in

rancor, virile in strength, from which Sparta backed, yet only to return

and fight again, only to fall at last as Athens did, as Thebes did too,

beneath the might of Macedon, expiring all of them in those convulsions

that summoned Rome.

Meanwhile there was but light. Death had not come. In between was the

unexampled reign of beauty during which, after AEschylus and Pindar, came

the splendors of Sophocles, the magnificence of Euripides, Socratic

wisdom, and the rich, rare laugh of Aristophanes. That being insufficient,

there was Pheidias, there was Plato, art at its highest, beauty at its

best, and, that the opulent chain they formed might not sever too

suddenly, there followed Praxiteles, Apelles, Aristotle, Epicurus, and

Demosthenes. Even with them that chain could not end. Intertwisting with

the coil of death, it Hellenized Asia, Atticized Alexandria, girdled Rome,

resting in the latter's Lower Empire until recovered by the delighted

Renaissance.

The names of the Periclean age are high. There is a higher one yet, that

of Pericles. Statesman, orator, philosopher, soldier, artist, poet, and

lover, Pericles was so great that, another Zeus, he was called the

Olympian. If to him Egeria came, would it not, a poet somewhere asked, be

uncivil to depict her as less than he? It would be not only uncivil but

untrue.

Said Themistocles, "You see that boy of mine? Though but five, he governs

the universe. Yes, for he rules his mother, his mother rules me, I rule

Athens and Athens the world." After Themistocles it was Pericles' turn to

govern and be ruled. His sovereign was Aspasia.

Aspasia had come from Miletus with another hetaira to Athens which her

companion vacated to be bride of a Thessalian king, but where she became

the wife of one beside whom mere kings were nothing. It was her beauty

that first attracted Pericles. Beauty does attract, but only graciousness

can detain. In the home of Pericles there was none, a woman merely of the

Xantippe type from whom he separated by common consent and put Aspasia,

not in her inferior place, but on a pedestal before which he knelt.

Aspasia became not merely his wife but his inspiration, his comrade, his

aid. She worked for him and with him. She encouraged him in his work,

accompanied him in his battles, consoled him in his fatigues, entertained

his friends, talked philosophy with Socrates, frivolity with Alcibiades,

art with Pheidias, but love to him, displaying what Athens had socially

never seen, the spectacle of delicacy, culture, wit, beauty, and ease

united in a woman, and that woman a woman of the world.

The sight, highly novel, established a precedent and with it fresh

conceptions of what woman might be. In the _Iliad_, she was money. Money

has a language of its own. In the enchanted islands of the _Odyssey_ she

was charm. Charm has a more distinct appeal. In Lesbos she was emancipated

and that made her headier still. But in the opulent Athenian nights

Aspasia revealed her not physically attractive merely, not personally

alluring only, not simply free, but spirituelle, addressing the mind as

well as the eye, inspiring the one, refining the other, captivating the

soul as well as the senses, the ideal woman, comrade, helpmate, and

sweetheart in one.

Like the day it was too fair. Presently the duel occurred. Lacedaemon,

trailing the pest in her tunic, ravaged the Eleusinian glades. Pericles

died. Aspasia disappeared. The duel, waning a moment, was resumed. It

debilitated Sparta, exhausted Athens, and awoke Thebes, who fell on both

but only to be eaten by Philip.

It would have been interesting to have seen that man and his Epeirote

queen who hung serpents about her, played with them among poisonous weeds

and who, because of another woman, killed her king, burned her rival

alive, and gave to the world Alexander.

It would have been more interesting still to have seen the latter when,

undermined by every vice of the vicious East, with nothing left to

conquer, with no sin left to commit, with no crime left undone, he

descended into the great sewer that Babylon was and there, in a golden

house, on a golden throne, in the attributes of divinity was worshipped as

a god. Behind him was a background of mitred priests and painted children,

about him were the fabulous beasts that roamed into heraldry, with them

was a harem of three hundred and sixty-five odalisques apportioned to the

days of the year, while above swung the twelve signs of the zodiac. In

that picture Rome was to find the prototype of her Caesars, as in it

already Hellas has seen the supplanting of Aphrodite by Ishtar.

Greece, still young, lingered briefly, then without decrepitude, without

decadence, ceased, nationally, to be. Aphrodite, young too, died with her.

As Venus Pandemos Rome evoked her. The evocation was successful. Venus

Pandemos appeared. But even from Olympus, which together with Hellenic

civilization, Rome absorbed, Aphrodite had already departed. Those who

truly sought her found her indeed, but like the art she inspired only in

marble and story.

VI

THE BANQUET

It used to be a proverb that Apollo created AEsculapius to heal the body

and Plato to heal the soul. Plato may have failed to do that. But he

heightened its stature. It has been loftier since he taught. In his

teaching was the consummation of intellect. His mind was sky-like, his

speech perfection. Antiquity that thought Zeus must have revealed himself

to Pheidias, thought, too, that should the high god deign to speak to

mortals, it would be in the nightingale tongue of refinement which Plato

employed. The beauty of it is not always apprehensible. His views, also,

are not always understood. Yet an attempt must be made to supply some

semblance of the latter because of the influence they have had.

"I know but one little thing," said Socrates. "It is love." Socrates was

ironical. That which it pleased him to call little, Plato regarded as a

special form of the universal law of attraction. His theories on the

subject are contained in the _Phaedrus_ and the _Symposion_, two poetically

luxurious works produced by him in the violet-crowned city during the

brilliant Athenian day, before Socrates had gone and Sparta had come.

The _Symposion_ is a banquet. A few friends, Phaedrus and Pausanias, men of

letters; Eryximachus, a physician; Aristophanes, the poet; Socrates, the

seer, have been supping at the house of Agathon. By way of food for

thought love is suggested. Discussion regarding it follows, in which

Socrates joins--a simple expedient that enabled Plato to put in his

master's mouth the aesthetic nectar of personal views of which the real

Socrates never dreamed.

Among the first disputants is Phaedrus. In his quality of man of letters he

began with extravagant praise of Eros, whom he called the mightiest of all

gods, the chief minister of happiness.

To this, Pausanias, also a literary man and therefore indisposed to agree

with another, objected. "Phaedrus would be right," he said, "if there were

but one Eros. But there are two. Love is inseparable from Aphrodite. If

there were only one Aphrodite there would be only one love. But there are

two Aphrodites. Hence there must be two loves. One Aphrodite is Urania or

celestial, the other Pandemos or common. The divinities should all be

lauded. Still there is a distinction between these two. They vary as

actions do. Consider what we are now doing, drinking and talking. These

things in themselves are neither good nor evil. They become one or the

other in accordance with the way in which we do them. In the same manner,

not every love, but only that which is inherently altruistic, can be

called divine. The love inspired by Aphrodite Pandemos is essentially

common. It is such as appeals to vulgar natures. It is of the senses, not

of the soul. Intemperate persons experience this love, which seeks only

its own gross end. Whereas the love that comes of Aphrodite Urania has for

object the happiness and improvement of another."

With all of which Eryximachus agreed. Eryximachus was a physician,

consequently more naturalistic, and in agreeing he extended the duality of

love over all things, over plants and animals as well as over man,

claiming for it a universal influence in nature, science, and the arts,

expressing himself meanwhile substantially as follows:

In the human body there are two loves, confessedly different, as such

their desires are unlike, the desire of the healthy body being one thing,

that of the unhealthy something else. The skilful physician knows how to

separate them, how to convert one into the other, and reconcile their

hostile elements. In music there is the same reconciliation of opposites.

This is demonstrable by rhythm, which is composed of elements short and

long, and which, though differing, may be harmonized. The course of the

seasons is also an example of both principles. When the opposing forces,

sunlight and rain, heat and cold, blend harmoniously they bring fertility

and health, precisely as their discord has a counter influence. The

knowledge of love in relation to the revolutions of the heavenly bodies is

termed astronomy. Lastly, religion, through the knowledge which it has of

what is pious and what is impious, is love's intermediary between men and

gods.

Such is love's universal sway. The origin of its duality Aristophanes then

explained. Sages, neighbors of the gods, of whom Empedocles was the last

representative, had supposed, that in the beginning of things, those that

loved were one. Later they were separated. Thereafter they sought the

better half which they had lost. This tradition, possibly Orphic,

Aristophanes took for text and embroidered it with his usual

grotesqueness. But beneath the humor of his illustrations there was an

idea less profound perhaps than delicate. Love, however regarded, may not

improperly be defined as the union of two beings who complete each other

and who, from the stand-point of the Orphic tradition, reciprocally

discover in each other what individually they once had and since have

lacked. On the other hand, it may be that in the symbolism which

Aristophanes employed was an attempt to apply to humanity the theory

which Eryximachus had set forth. At the origin of all things is unity,

which divides and becomes multiple only to return to its primal shape.

Human nature, as masculinely and femininely exemplified, is primitive

unity after division has come, and love is the return to that unity which

in itself is of all things the compelling law. In other words, one is

many, and, love aiding, many are one.

But whatever Aristophanes may have meant, his views were subsidiary. It

was to Socrates that Plato reserved the privilege of penetrating into the

essence of love and of displaying its progressus and consummation. "How

many things that I never thought of," Socrates on reading his own

discourse, exclaimed, "this young man has made me say."

Among them was an exposition of the fundamental law of human nature, the

universal desire for happiness. In the demonstrations that followed good

was shown to be a means to happiness; consequently, every one, loving

happiness, loves good also. In this sense love belongs to all. Every one,

in loving happiness, loves good and craves a perpetual possession of both.

But different minds have different ways of attaining the same end. One man

aspires to happiness through wealth, another through place, a third

through philosophy. These are uninfluenced by Eros. The influence of Eros

is exerted when the perpetual possession of happiness is sought in

immortality.

But life itself comports no continuity. Life is but a succession of

phenomena, of which one departs as another appears, and of which each,

created by what has gone before, creates that which ensues, the result

being that, though from womb to tomb a man be called the same, never,

either mentally or physically, is he. The constant disintegration and

renovation of tissues correspond with the constant flux and reflux of

sensations, emotions, thoughts. The man of this instant perishes. He is

replaced by a new one during the next. That proposition true of the

individual is equally true of the species, continuance of either being

secured only through reproduction. The love of immortality manifests

itself therefore through the reproductive impulse. Beauty, in another,

exercises an attractive force that enables a gratification of the impulse

which ugliness arrests. Hence comes the love of beauty. In some, it

stimulates the body, attracting them to women and inducing them to

perpetuate themselves through the production of children. In others, it

stimulates the mind, inducing the creation of children such as Lycurgus

left to Sparta, Solon to Athens, Homer and Hesiod to humanity, children

that built them temples which women-born offspring could not erect.

These are the lesser mysteries of love. The higher mysteries, then

unveiled, disclose a dialectic ladder of which the first rung touches

earth, the last the divine. To mount from one to the other, love should

rise as does the mind which from hypothesis to hypothesis reaches truth.

In like manner, love, mounting from form to form, reaches the primordial

principle from which all beauty proceeds. The rightful order of going

consists in using earthly beauties as ascending steps, passing from one

fair form to all fair forms, from fair forms to beautiful deeds, from

beautiful deeds to beautiful conceptions, until from beautiful conceptions

comes the knowledge of beauty supreme.

"There," Socrates continued, "is the home of every science and of all

philosophy. It is not, though, initiation's final stage. The heart

requires more. Drawn by the power of love, it cannot rest in a sphere of

abstraction. It must go higher, higher yet, still higher to the ultimate

degree where it unites with beauty divine."

That union which is the true life is not, Socrates explained,

annihilation, nor is it unity, or at least not unity which excludes

division. The lover and the beloved are distinct. They are two and yet but

one, wedded in immaculate beauty.

"If anything," Socrates concluded, "can lend value to life it is the

spectacle of that beauty, pure, unique, aloof from earthly attributes,

free from the vanities of the world. It is a spectacle which,

apprehensible to the mind alone, enables the beholder to create, not

phantoms, but verities, and in so doing, to merit immortality, if mortal

may."

Socrates, who had been leaning against the table, lay back on his couch.

The grave discourse was ended. Aristophanes was preparing to reply.

Suddenly there was violent knocking at the door without. A little later

the voice of Alcibiades was heard resounding through the court. In a state

of great intoxication he was roaring and shouting "Agathon! Where is

Agathon? Lead me to Agathon." Then at once, massively crowned with

flowers, half supported by a flute girl, Alcibiades, ribald and

importunate, staggered in. The grave discourse was ended, the banquet as

well.

There is an Orphic fragment which runs: The innumerable souls that are

precipitated from the great heart of the universe swarms as birds swarm.

They flutter and sink. From sphere to sphere they fall and in falling

weep. They are thy tears, Dionysos. O Liberator divine, resummon thy

children to thy breast of light.

In the Epiphanies at Eleusis the doctrine disclosed was demonstrative of

that conception. The initiate learned the theosophy of the soul, its

cycles and career. In that career the soul's primal home was color, its

sustenance light. From beatitude to beatitude it floated, blissfully, in

ethereal evolutions, until, attracted by the forms of matter, it sank

lower, still lower, to awake in the senses of man.

The theory detained Plato. In the _Phaedrus_, which is the supplement of

the _Symposion_, he made it refract something approaching the splendor of

truth revealed. With Socrates again for mouthpiece, he declared that in

anterior existence we all stood a constant witness of the beautiful and

the true, adding that, if now the presence of any shape of earthly

loveliness evokes a sense of astonishment and delight, the effect is due

to reminiscences of what we once beheld when we were other than what we

are.

"It seems, then," Plato noted, "as though we had found again some object,

very precious, which, once ours, had vanished. The impression is not

illusory. Beauty is really a belonging which we formerly possessed.

Mingling in the choir of the elect our souls anteriorly contemplated the

eternal essences among which beauty shone. Fallen to this earth we

recognize it by the intermediary of the most luminous of our senses.

Sight, though the subtlest of the organs, does not perceive wisdom. Beauty

is more apparent. At the sight of a face lit with its rays, memory

returns, emotions recur, we think love is born in us and it is, yet it is

but born anew."

There is a Persian manuscript which, read one way, is an invocation to

love in verse, and which, read backward, is an essay on mathematics in

prose. Love is both a poem and a treatise. It was in that aspect Plato

regarded it. It had grown since Homer. It had developed since the Song of

Songs. With Plato it attained a height which it never exceeded until Plato

himself revived with the Renaissance. In the interim it wavered and

diminished. There came periods when it passed completely away. Whether

Plato foresaw that evaporation, is conjectural. But his projection of the

drunken Alcibiades into the gravity of the Banquet is significant. The

dissolute, entering suddenly there, routed beauty and was, it may be, but

an unconscious prefigurement of the coming orgy in which love also

disappeared.

VII

ROMA-AMOR

It was the mission of Rome to make conquests, not statues, not to create,

but to quell. Her might reverberated in the roar of her name. Roma means

strength. It is only in reading it backward that Amor appears. Love there

was secondary. Might had precedence. It was Might that made first the

home, then the state, then the senate that ruled the world. That might,

which was so great that to ablate it the earth had to bear new races, was

based on two things, citizenship and the family. The title Romanus sum was

equal to that of rex. The title of matron was superior.

The Romans, primarily but a band of outlaws, carried away the daughters of

their neighbors by force. Their first conquest was woman. The next was the

gods. In the rude beginnings the latter were savage as they. Revealed in

panic and thunder, they were gods of prey and of fright. Rome, whom they

mortified, made no attempt to impose them on other people. With superior

tact she lured their gods from them. She made love to them. With naive

effrontery she seduced them away. The process Macrobius described. At the

walls of any beleaguered city, a consul, his head veiled, pronounced the

consecrated words. "If there be here gods that have under their care this

people and this city, we pray, supplicate, and adjure them to desert the

temples, to abandon the altars, to inspire terror there, to come to Rome

near us and ours, that our temples, being more agreeable and precious, may

predispose them to protect us. It being understood and agreed that we

dedicate to them larger altars, grander games."[13]

It was with that formula that Rome conquered the world. She omitted it but

once, at the walls of Jerusalem. The deity whom she forgot there to

invoke, entered her temples and overthrew them.

Meanwhile the flatteries of the formula no known god could resist. In

triumph Rome escorted one after another away, leaving the forsaken but

doorposts to worship, and stimulating in them the desire to become part of

the favored city where their divinities were. But in that city everything

was closed to them. Deserted by their gods, divested, in consequence, of

religion and, therefore, of every right, they could no longer pray, the

significance of signs and omens was lost to them, they were plebs. But the

Romans, who had captivated the divinities, and who, through them, alone

possessed the incommunicable science of augury, were patrician. In that

distinction is the origin of Rome's aristocracy and her might.

The might pre-existed in the despotic organization of the home. There the

slaves and children were but things that could be sold or killed. They

were the chattels of the paterfamilias, whose wife was a being without

influence or initiative, a creature in the hands of a man, unable to leave

him for any cause whatever, a domestic animal over whom he had the right

of life and death, a ward who, regarded as mentally irresponsible--_propter

animi laevitatem_--might not escape his power even though he died, a woman

whom he could repudiate at will and of whom he was owner and judge.[14]

Such was the law and such it remained, a dead letter, nullified by a

reason profoundly human, which the legislature had overlooked, but which

the Asiatics had foreseen and which they combated with the seraglio where

woman, restricted to a fraction of her lord, exhausted herself in

contending even for that. But Rome, in making the paterfamilias despotic,

made him monogamous as well. He was strictly restricted to one wife. As a

consequence, the materfamilias, while theoretically a slave, became

practically what woman with her husband to herself and no rivals to fear

almost inevitably does become--supreme. Legally she was the property of

her husband, actually he was hers. When he returned from forage or from

war, she alone had the right to greet him, she alone might console and

caress. In the eye of the gods if not of the law she was his equal when

not his superior. By virtue of the law he could divorce her at will, he

could kill her if she so much as presumed to drink wine. By virtue of her

supremacy five hundred and twenty years passed before a divorce

occurred.[15]

The supremacy was otherwise facilitated. The atrium, unlike the gynaeceum,

was not a remote and inaccessible apartment, it was the living-room, the

sanctuary of the household gods, a common hall to which friends were

admitted, visitors came, and where the matron presided. From the moment

when, in accordance with the ceremonies of marriage, her hair--in memory

of the Sabines--parted by a javelin's point, an iron ring--symbol of

eternity--on her fourth finger, the wedding bread eaten, her purchase

money paid, and she, lifted over the threshold of the atrium, uttered the

sacramental words--Ubi tu Caius, ibi ego Caia--from that moment, legally

_in manum viri_, actually she became mistress of whatever her husband

possessed, she became his associate, his partner, sharing with him the

administration of the patrimony, governing the household, the slaves,

Caius himself.

Said Cato: "Everywhere else women are ruled by men, but we who rule all

men, are ruled by women." They had done so from the first. The treatment

of the Sabines was clearly violent in addition to being mythical. But,

even in legend, these young women were not deserted as were the Ariadnes

and Medeas of Greece. They became Roman matrons, as such circled with

respect. Later, Egeria instituted with symbolic nymphs a veritable worship

of women. Thereafter feminine prerogatives developed from the theory and

practice of marriage itself. In theory, marriage was an association for

the pursuit of things human and divine.[16] In practice, it was the fusion

of two lives--a fusion manifestly incomplete if all were not held in

common. Community of goods means equality. From equality to superiority

there is but a step. The matron took it. She became supreme as already she

was patrician.

Between patrician and plebeian there was an abyss too wide for marriage to

bridge. Such a union would have been regarded as abnormal. The plebeian

did not at first dare to conceive of such a thing. When later he protested

against his helotry it was in silence. He but vacated the city where the

earth threatened to open beneath him and where his lost gods brooded

inimical still. Ultimately, protests persisting, the patricians consented

that these nobodies should be somebodies, provided at least they were men.

Already Roman by birth, they became Roman by law.

Whether man or woman, it was a high privilege to be that. The woman who

was not, the manumitted slave, the foreigner within the walls, the code

disdained to consider. Statutes against shames took no account of her.

Beyond the pale even of ethics, the attitude to her of others concerned

but herself.

But about the Roman woman were thrown Lycurgian laws. A forfeiture of her

honor was a disgrace to the State. Her people killed her--_Cognati necanto

uti volent_--as they liked. On the morrow there was nothing that told of

the tragedy save the absence of a woman seen no more. If she were seen, if

father or husband neglected his duty, public indictment ensued with death

or exile for result. From the indictment and its penalties appeal could be

had. From the edile could be obtained the _Licentia stupri_, the right to

the antique livery of shame. But thereafter the purple no longer bordered

the robe of the ex-patrician. She could no longer be driven in chariots or

be borne in litters by slaves; the fillet, taken from her, was replaced

by a yellow wig; a harlot then, she was civilly dead.[17]

Tacitus has said that under Tiberius a special law had to be enacted to

prevent women of rank from such descent. During the austerer days of the

republic the derogation was unknown. The Greek ideal of woman which the

hetaira exemplified was beauty. Honor, which was the Roman ideal, the

matron achieved.

To the matrons reverently Rome bowed. The purple border on their mantle

compelled respect. The modesty of their eyes and ears was protected by

grave laws. In days of danger the senate asked their aid. The gods could

have no purer incense than their prayers. There was no homage greater than

their esteem. Such a word as dignity was too colorless to be employed

regarding them, it was the term majesty that was used. The vestal was but

a more perfect type of these women on whose tomb _univirae_--the wife of

one man--was alone inscribed.

The honor of the Roman matron was a national affair, the honor of a Roman

girl a public concern. Because of the one, royalty was abolished. Because

of the other, the decemvirs fell. In neither case was there revolution. On

the contrary. In the first instance, that of Lucretia, it was the

insurrection of Tarquin against the inviolability of virtue. In the

second, that of Virginia, it was the insurrection of Appius Claudius

against the inviolability of love, dual insurrections, probably mythical,

which Rome, with legendary fury, suppressed, and which, whether historic

or imaginary, was typical of the energetic character that made her what

she was, proud, despotic, sovereign of the world.

"The empire that Rome won," St. Augustin, with agreeable ingenuousness,

remarked, "God gave her in order that, though pagan and consequently

unrewardable hereafter, her virtues should not remain unrecognized below."

Nor were they, and that, too, despite the fact that they omitted to

endure, except, as Cicero said, in books; "in old books," he added, "which

no one reads any more." But in the interim three things had occurred.

Greece, wounded to the death, had flooded Rome with the hemorrhages of her

expiring art. Asia had undyked the sea of her corruption. Both had

cascaded their riches. Rome hitherto had been poor, she had been puritan.

Hers had been the peasant's hard plain life. The costume of the matron,

which custom had made stately, the lex Oppia had made severe. This

statute, passed at the time of the Carthagenian invasion, was a measure of

public utility devised to increase the budget of war. Its abrogation

coincided with the fall of Macedon and the return of AEmilius Paulus,

bringing with him the sack of seventy cities, the prodigious booty of

ravaged Greece, the prelude to that of the East. Behind these eruptions

was the contagion of fastidious caprices that demoralized Rome.

Heretofore, innocent of excesses, ignorant of refinements, in antique

simplicity, Rome had sat briefly and upright before her frugal fare.

Thereafter, on cushioned beds were repasts, long and savorous, eaten to

the sound of crotal and of flute. There were after-courses of ballerine

and song, the refreshment of perfume, the luxurious tonic of the bath, the

red feather that enabled one to eat again, the marvels of Asiatic

debauchery, the surprises of Hellenic grace. In the charm of foreign

spells former austerities were forgot. Romans who had not been initiated

in them abroad had the returning victors for tutors at home.

Sylla was particularly instructive. Carthagenian in ferocity, Babylonian

in lubricity, Hamilcar and Belshazzar in one, the ugliest and most

formidable Roman of the lot, his life, which an ulcer ravaged, was a

succession of massacres, orgies, and crimes. Married one after another to

three women of wealth, who to him were but stepping stones to fortune, on

a day when he was preparing to give one of those festivals, the splendor

and the art of which he had learned from Mithridates, his third wife fell

ill. Death discourages Fortune. Sylla sent her a bill of divorce and

ordered her to be taken from the house, which was done, just in time, she

was dying. Sylla promptly remarried, then married again, and yet again.

Meanwhile, he had a daughter and an eye on the promising Pompey. His

daughter was married. So too was Pompey. He forced his daughter from her

husband, forced Pompey to repudiate his wife, and forced them to marry.

Sylla had brought with him from the East its curious cups in which blood

and passion mingled, and spilled them in the open streets. Crassus outdid

him in magnificence, and Lucullus eclipsed them both. Asia had yielded to

these men the fortune of her people, the honor of her children, the

treasure of her temples, the secrets of their sin. The Orientalisms which

they imported, their deluge of coin, their art of marrying cruelty to

pleasure, set Rome mad.

Among the maddest was Catiline. That tiger, in whose vestibule were

engraved the laws of facile love, affiliated women of rank, others of

none, soldiers and slaves, in his convulsive cause. Shortly, throughout

the Latin territory, a mysterious sound was heard. It was like the clash

of arms afar. The augurs, interrogated, announced that the form of the

State was about to change. The noise was the crackling of the

republic.[18]

Before it fell came Caesar. Sylla told him to repudiate his wife as Pompey

had. Caesar declined to be commanded. The house of Julia, to which he

belonged, descended, he declared, from Venus. Venus Pandemos, perhaps. But

the ancestry was typical. Cinna drafted a law giving him the right to

marry as often as he chose. After the episodes in Gaul, when he entered

Rome, his legions warned the citizens to have an eye to their wives.

Meanwhile, he had repudiated Pompeia, his wife, not to please Sylla but

himself, or rather because Publius Claudius, a young gallant, had been

discovered disguised as a woman assisting at the mysteries of the Bona

Dea, held on this occasion in Caesar's house. To these ceremonies men were

not admitted. The affair made a great scandal. Pompeia was suspected of

having helped Publius to be present. The suspicion was probably unfounded.

But Caesar held that his wife should be above suspicion. He divorced her in

consequence and married Calpurnia, not for love but for place. Her father

was consul. Caesar wanted his aid and got it. Then, after creating a

solitude and calling it peace, after turning over two million people into

so many dead flies, after giving geography such a twist that to-day whoso

says Caesar says history--after these pauses in the ascending scale of his

unequalled life, at the age of fifty, bald, tired, and very pale, there

was brought to him at Alexandria a bundle, from which, when opened, there

emerged a little wonder called Cleopatra, but who was Isis unveiled.[19]

VIII

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.

In Greece beauty was the secret of life. In Egypt it was the secret of

death. The sphinxes that crouched in the avenues, the caryatides at the

palace doors, the gods on their pedestals, had an expression enigmatic but

identical. It was as though some of them listened, while others repeated

the story of the soul's career. In the chambers of the tombs the echo of

the story descended. The dead were dreaming, and draining it. Saturated

with aromatics, wound about with spirals of thin bands, they were dressed

as for nuptials. On their faces was the same beatitude that the statues

displayed.

Isis typified that beatitude. The goddess, in whose mysteries were taught

both the immortality of the soul and the secret of its migrations, was one

of Ishtar's many avatars, the only one whose attributes accorded even

remotely with the divine. Egypt adored her. There were other gods. There

was Osiris, the father; Horus, the son, who with Isis formed the trinity

which India and Persia both possessed, and which Byzance afterward

perpetuated. There were other gods also, a hierarchy of great idle

divinities with, beneath them, cohorts of inferior fiends. But the great

light was Isis. Goddess of life and goddess of death, she had for sceptre

a lotos and for crown a cormorant; the lotos because it is emblematic of

love, and the cormorant because, however replete, it says never Enough.

Isis was the consort of Osiris. She was also his sister. It was customary

for the queens of Egypt to call themselves after her, and, like her, to

marry a brother. Cleopatra followed the usual custom. In other ways she

must have resembled her. She was beautiful, but not remarkably so. The

Egyptian women generally were good-looking. The Asiatics admired them very

much. They were preferred to the Chinese, whose eyes oblique and

half-closed perturbed sages, demons even, with whom, Michelet has

suggested, they were perhaps akin. Cleopatra lacked that insidiousness.

Semi-Greek, a daughter of the Ptolomies, she had the charm of the Hellenic

hetaira. To aptitudes natural and very great, she added a varied

assortment of accomplishments. It is said that she could talk to any one

in any tongue. That is probably an exaggeration. But, though a queen, she

was ambitious; though a girl, she was lettered; succinctly, she was

masterful, a match for any man except Caesar.

Cleopatra must have been very heady. Caesar knew how to keep his head. He

could not have done what he did, had he not known. Dissolute, as all men

of that epoch had become, he differed from all of them in his

epicureanism. Like Epicurus, he was strictly temperate. He supped on dry

bread. Cato said that he was the first sober man that had tried to

overthrow the republic. But, then, he had been to school, to the best of

schools, which the world is. His studies _in anima vili_ had taught him

many things, among them, how to win and not be won. Cleopatra might almost

have been his granddaughter. But he was Caesar. His eyes blazed with

genius. Besides, he was the most alluring of men. Tall, slender, not

handsome but superb--so superb that Cicero mistook him for a fop from whom

the republic had nothing to fear--at seventeen he had fascinated pirates.

Ever since he had fascinated queens. In the long list, Cleopatra was but

another to this man whom the depths of Hither Asia, the mysteries that lay

beyond, the diadems of Cyrus and Alexander, the Vistula and the Baltic

claimed. There were his ambitions. They were immense. So were also

Cleopatra's. What he wanted, she wanted for him, and for herself as well.

She wanted him sovereign of the world and herself its empress.

These views, in so far as they concerned her, did not interest him very

greatly. His lack of interest he was, however, too well bred to display.

He solidified her throne, which at the time was not stable, left her a son

for souvenir, went away, forgot her, remembered her, invited her to Rome,

where, presumably with Calpurnia's permission, he put her up at his house,

and again forgot her. He was becoming divine, what is superior, immortal.

Even when dead, his name, adopted by the emperors of Rome, survived in

Czars and Kaisers. His power too, coextensive with Rome, persisted.

Severed as it was like his heart when he fell, the booty was divided

between Octavius, Lepidus, and Marc Antony.

Their triumvirate--duumvirate rather, Lepidus was nobody--matrimony

consolidated. Octavius married a relative of Antony and Antony married

Octavius' sister. Then the world was apportioned. Octavius got the

Occident, Antony the Orient. Rome became the capital of the one,

Alexandria that of the other. At the time Alexandria was Rome's rival and

superior. Rome, unsightly still with the atrocities of the Tarquins, had

neither art nor commerce. These things were regarded as the occupations of

slaves. Alexandria, purely Greek, very fair, opulent, and teeming, was the

universal centre of both, of learning too, of debauchery as well--elements

which its queen, a viper of the Nile, personified.

Before going there Antony made and unmade a dozen kings. Then, presently,

at Tarsus he ordered Cleopatra to come to him. Indolently, his subject

obeyed.

Caesar claimed descent from Venus. Antony's tutelary god was Bacchus, but

he claimed descent from Hercules, whom in size and strength he resembled.

The strength was not intellectual. He was an understudy of genius, a

soldier of limited intelligence, who tried to imitate Caesar and failed to

understand him, a big barbarian boy, by accident satrap and god.

At Rome he had seen Cleopatra. Whether she had noticed him is uncertain.

But the gilded galley with the purple sails, its silver oars, its canopy

of enchantments in which she went to him at Tarsus, has been told and

retold, sung and painted.

At the approach of Isis, the Tarsians crowded the shore. Bacchus, deserted

on his throne, sent an officer to fetch her to him. Cleopatra insisted

that he come to her. Antony, amused at the impertinence, complied. The

infinite variety of this woman, that made her a suite of surprises,

instantly enthralled him. From that moment he was hers, a lion in leash,

led captive into Alexandria, where, initiated by her into the inimitable

life, probably into the refinements of the savoir-vivre as well, Bacchus

developed into Osiris, while Isis transformed herself anew. She drank

with him, fished with him, hunted with him, drilled with him, played

tricks on him, and, at night, in slave's dress, romped with him in

Rhakotis--a local slum--broke windows, beat the watch, captivating the

captive wholly.[20]

Where she had failed with Caesar she determined to succeed with him, and

would have succeeded, had Antony been Caesar. Octavius was not Caesar,

either. Any man of ability, with the power and resources of which Antony

disposed, could have taken the Occident from him and, with Cleopatra,

ruled the world.

Together they dreamed of it. It was a beautiful dream, inimitable like

their life. Rumors of the one and of the other reached Octavius. He

waited, not impatiently and not long. Meanwhile Antony was still the

husband of Octavia. But Cleopatra had poisoned her brother-husband. There

being, therefore, no lawful reason why she and Antony should not marry,

they did. Together, in the splendid palace of the Bruchium--an antique gem

of which the historic brilliance still persists--they seated themselves,

he as Osiris, she as Isis, on thrones of gold. Their children they

declared kings of kings. Armenia, Phoenicia, Media, and Parthea, were

allotted to them. To Cleopatra's realm Antony added Syria, Lydia, and

Cyprus. These distributions constituted just so many dismemberments of

the res publica, Antony thought them so entirely within the scope of his

prerogatives that he sent an account of the proceedings to the senate.

With the account there went to Octavia a bill of divorce. Rome stood by

indignant. It was precisely what Octavius wanted.

Octavius had divorced his wife and married a married woman. According to

the ethics of the day, he was a model citizen, whereas Antony throning as

Osiris with a female Mithridates for consort, was as oblivious of Roman

dignity as of conjugal faith. In addition, it was found that he had made a

will by which Rome, in the event of capture, was devised as tributary city

to Cleopatra. Moreover, a senator, who had visited Antony at the Bruchium,

testified that he had seen him upholding the woman's litter like a slave.

It was obvious that he was mad, demented by her aphrodisiacs. But it was

obvious also that the gods of the East were rising, that Isis with her

cormorant, her lotos and her spangled arms, was arrayed against the Roman

penates.[21]

War was declared. At Actium the clash occurred. Antony might have won. But

before he had had time to lose, Cleopatra, with singular clairvoyance,

deserted him. Her reasons for believing that he would be defeated are not

clear, but her motive in going is obvious. She wanted to rule the world's

ruler, whoever he might be, and she thought by prompt defection to find

favor with Octavius.

At the sight of her scudding sail Antony lost his senses. Instead of

remaining and winning, as he might have, he followed her. Together they

reached Alexandria. But there it was no longer the inimitable life that

they led, rather that of the inseparables in death, or at least Antony so

fancied. Cleopatra intoxicated him with funereal delights while

corresponding in secret with Octavius who had written engagingly to her.

In the Bruchium the nights were festivals. By day she experimented on

slaves with different poisons. Antony believed that she was preparing to

die with him. She had no such intention. She was preparing to be rid of

him. Then, suddenly, the enemy was at the gates. Antony challenged

Octavius to single combat. Octavius sent him word that there were many

other ways in which he could end his life. At that the lion roared. Even

then he thought he might demolish him. He tried. He went forth to fight.

But Cleopatra had other views. The infantry, the cavalry, the flotilla,

joined the Roman forces. The viper of the Nile had betrayed him. Bacchus

had also. The night had been stirred by the hum of harps and the cries of

bacchantes bearing the tutelary god to the Romans.

Antony, staggering back to the palace, was told that Cleopatra had killed

herself. She had not, but fearful lest he kill her, she had hidden with

her treasure in a temple. Antony, after the Roman fashion, kept always

with him a slave who should kill him when his hour was come. The slave's

name, Plutarch said, was Eros. Antony called him. Eros raised a sword, but

instead of striking his master, struck himself. Antony reddened and

imitated him. Another slave then told him that Cleopatra still lived. He

had himself taken to where she was, and died while attempting to console

this woman who was preparing for the consolations of Octavius.

It is said that she received the conqueror magnificently. But his engaging

letters had been _ruses de guerre_. They had triumphed. The new Caesar

wanted to triumph still further. He wanted Cleopatra, a chain about her

neck, dragged after his chariot through Rome. He wanted in that abjection

to triumph over the entire East. Instead of yielding to her, as she had

expected, he threatened to kill her children if she eluded him by killing

herself. The threat was horrible. But more horrible still was the thought

of the infamy to be.

Shortly, on a bed of gold, dressed as for nuptials, she was found dead

among her expiring women, one of whom even then was putting back on her

head her diadem which had fallen. At last the cormorant had cried

"Enough!"

Said Horace: "Nunc est bibendum."

IX

THE IMPERIAL ORGY

Death, in taking Cleopatra, closed the doors of the temple Janus. After

centuries of turmoil, there was peace. The reign of the Caesars had begun.

Octavius became Augustus, the rest of the litter divine. The triumvirs of

war were succeeded by the triumvirs of love. These were the poets.

Catullus had gone with the republic. In verse he might have been primus.

He was too negligent. His microscopic masterpieces form but a brief bundle

of pastels. The face repeated there is Lesbia's. He saw her first lounging

in a litter that slaves carried along the Sacred Way. Immediately he was

in love with her. The love was returned. In the delight of it the poet was

born. His first verses were to her, so also were his last. But Lesbia

wearied of song and kisses, at least of his. She eloped with his nearest

friend. In the _Somnambula_ the tenor sings _O perche non posso

odiarte_--Why can I not hate thee? The song is but a variant on that of

Catullus. Odi et amo, I love and hate you, he called after her. But, if

she heard, she heeded as little as Beatrice did when Dante cursed the day

he saw her first. Dante ceased to upbraid, but did not cease to love. He

was but following the example of Catullus, with this difference: Beatrice

went to heaven, Lesbia to hell, to an earthly hell, the worst of any, to a

horrible inn on the Tiber where sailors brawled. She descended to that,

fell there, rather. Catullus still loved her.

At the sight of Cynthia another poet was born. What Lesbia pulchra had

been to Catullus, Cynthia pulchrior became to Propertius. He swore that

she should be his sole muse, and kept his word, in so far as verse was

concerned. Otherwise, he was less constant. It is doubtful if she deserved

more, or as much. Never did a girl succeed better in tormenting a lover,

never was there a lover so poetically wretched as he. In final fury he

flung at her farewells that were maledictions, only to be recaptured,

beaten even, subjugated anew. She made him love her. When she died, her

death nearly killed him. Nearly, but not quite. He survived, and, first

among poets, intercepted the possibility of reunion there where all things

broken are made complete, and found again things vanished--_Lethum non

omnia finit_.

Horace resembled him very remotely. A little fat man--brevis atque obesus,

Suetonius said--he waddled and wallowed in the excesses of the day,

telling, in culpable iambics, of fair faces, facile amours, easy

epicureanism, rose-crowned locks, yet telling of them--and of other

matters less admissible--on a lyre with wonderful chords. At the

conclusion of the third book of the _Odes_, he declared that he had

completed a monument which the succession of centuries without number

could not destroy. "I shall not die," he added. He was right. Because of

that flame of fair faces, lovers turn to him still. Because of his

iambics, he has a niche in the hearts of the polite. Versatile in love and

in verse, his inconstancy and his art are nowhere better displayed than in

the incomparable _Donec gratus eram tibi_, which Ponsard rewrote:

HORACE.

Tant que tu m'as aime, que nul autre plus digne

N'entourait de ses bras ton col blanc comme un cygne,

J'ai vecu plus heureux que Xerxes le grand roi.

LYDIE.

Tant que tu n'as aime personne plus que moi,

Quand Chloe n'etait pas preferee a Lydie,

J'ai vecu plus illustre et plus fiere qu'Ilie.

HORACE.

J'appartiens maintenant a la blonde Chloe,

Qui plait par sa voix douce et son luth enjoue.

Je suis pret a mourir pour prolonger sa vie.

LYDIE.

Calais maintenant tient mon ame asservie,

Nous brulons tous les deux de mutuels amours,

Et je mourrais deux fois pour prolonger ses jours.

HORACE.

Mais quoi! Si j'ai regret de ma premiere chaine?

Si Venus de retour sous son joug me ramene?

Si je refuse a l'autre, et te rends mon amour?

LYDIE.

Encor que Calais soit beau comme le jour,

Et toi plus inconstant que la feuille inconstante,

Avec toi je vivrais et je mourrais contente.

Horace was the poet of ease, Catullus of love, Propertius of passion,

Tibullus of sentiment. Ovid was the poet of pleasure. A man of means, of

fashion, of the world, what to-day would be called a gentleman, he might

have been laureate of the Empire. Corinna interfered. Corinna was his

figurative muse. Whether she were one or many is uncertain, but nominally

at least it was for her that he wrote the suite of feverish fancies

entitled the "Art of Love" and which were better entitled the "Art of not

Loving at all." Subsequently, he planned a great Homeric epic. But, if

Corinna inspired masterpieces, she gave him no time to complete them. She

wanted her poet to herself. She refused to share him even with the gods.

It is supposed that Corinna was Julia, daughter of Augustus. Because of

her eyes, more exactly because of her father's, Ovid was banished among

barbarian brutes. It was rather a frightful penalty for participating in

the indiscretions of a woman who had always been the reverse of discreet.

Corinna, as described by Ovid, was a monster of perversity. Julia, as

described by Tacitus, yielded to her nothing in that respect.

The epoch itself was strange, curiously fecund in curious things that

became more curious still. Rome then, thoroughly Hellenized, had become

very fair. There were green terraces and porphyry porticoes that leaned to

a river on which red galleys passed, there were bronze doors and garden

roofs, glancing villas and temples more brilliant still. There were

spacious streets, a Forum curtained with silk, the glint and evocations of

triumphal war. There were theatres in which a multitude could jeer at an

emperor, and arenas in which an emperor could watch a multitude die. On

the stage, there were tragedies, pantomime, farce. There were races in the

circus and in the sacred groves, girls with the Orient in their eyes and

slim waists that swayed to the crotals. Into the arenas patricians

descended, in the amphitheatre were criminals from Gaul, in the Forum,

philosophers from Greece. For Rome's entertainment the mountains sent

lions; the deserts giraffes; there were boas from the jungles, bulls from

the plains, hippopotami from the rushes of the Nile, and, above them,

beasts greater than they--the Caesars.

There had been the first, memory of whose grandiose figure lingered still.

Rome recalled the unforgettable, and recalled, too, his face which

incessant debauches had blanched. After him had come Augustus, a pigmy by

comparison, yet otherwise more depraved. He gone, there was the spectacle

of Tiberius devising infamies so monstrous that to describe them new words

were coined. That being insufficient, there followed Caligula, without

whom Nero, Claud, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus could

never have been. It was he who gave them both inspiration and incentive.

It was he who built the Cloacus Maximus in which all Rome rolled.

Augustus had done a little digging for it himself, but hypocritically as

he did everything, devising ethical laws as a cloak for turpitudes of his

own. Mecaenas, his minister and lackey, divorced and remarried twenty

times. Augustus repudiated his own marriages, those of his kin as well.

Suetonius said of Caligula that it was uncertain which were viler, the

unions he contracted, their brevity, or their cause. With such examples,

it was inevitable that commoner people united but to part, and that,

insensibly, the law annulled as a caprice a clause that defined marriage

as the inseparable life.[22]

Under the Caesars marriage became a temporary arrangement, abandoned and

re-established as often as one liked. Seneca said that women of rank

counted their years by their husbands. Juvenal said that it was in that

fashion that they counted their days. Tertullian added that divorce was

the result of marriage. Divorce, however, was not obligatory. Matrimony

was. According to the Lex Pappea Poppoea, whoso at twenty-five was not

married, whoso, divorced or widowed, did not remarry, whoso, though

married, was childless, _ipso facto_ became a public enemy, incapable of

inheriting or of serving the State. To this law--an Augustan

hypocrisy--only a technical attention was paid. Men married just enough to

gain a position or inherit a legacy. The next day they got a divorce. At

the moment of need a child was adopted. The moment passed the brat was

disowned. As with men so with women. The univira became the many-husbanded

wife, occasionally a matron with no husband at all, one who, to escape the

consequences of the lex Pappea Poppoea, hired a man to loan her his

name, and who, with an establishment of her own, was free to do as she

liked, to imitate men at their worst, to fight like them and with them

for power, to dabble in the bloody dramas of State, to climb on the throne

and kill there or be killed; perhaps, less ambitiously, whipping her

slaves, summoning the headsman to them, quieting her nerves with drink,

appearing on the stage, in the arena even, contending as a gladiator

there, and remaining a patrician meanwhile.

In those days a sin was a prayer, and a prayer, Perseus said, was an

invocation at which a meretrix would blush to hear pronounced aloud.

Religion sanctioned anything. The primal gods, supplemented with the lords

and queens of other skies, had made Rome an abridgment of every

superstition, the temple of every crime. Asiatic monsters, which Hellenic

poetry had deodorized, landed there straight from the Orient, their native

hideousness unchanged. It was only the graceful Greek myths that Rome

transformed. Eros, who in Arcady seemed atiptoe, so delicately did he

tread upon the tender places of the soul, acquired, behind the mask of

Cupid, a maliciousness that was simian. Aphrodite, whose eyes had been

lifted to the north and south, and who in Attica was draped with light,

obtained as Venus the leer of the Lampsacene. Long since from Syria

Astarte had arrived, as already, torn by Cilician pirates from Persia,

Mithra had come, while, from Egypt, had strayed Apis from whose mouth two

phalluses issued horizontally.

These were Rome's gods, the divinities about whom men and maidens

assembled, and to whom pledges were made. There were others, so many, in

such hordes had they come, that Petronius said they outnumbered the

population. The lettered believed in them no more than we do. But, like

the Athenians, they lived among a people that did. Moreover, the lettered

were few. Rome, brutal at heart, sanguinary and voluptuous, fought, she

did not read. She could applaud, but not create. Her literature, like her

gods, her art, her corruption, had come from afar. Her own breasts were

sterile. When she gave birth, it was to a litter of monsters, by accident

to a genius, again to a poet, to Caesar and to Lucretius, the only men of

letters ever born within her walls.

Meanwhile, though the Pantheon was obviously but a lupanar, the people

clung piously to creeds that justified every disorder, tenaciously to gods

that sanctified every vice, and fervently to Caesars that incarnated them

all.

The Caesars were religion in a concrete form. Long before, Ennius, the

Homer of Latium, had announced that the gods were but great men. The

Caesars accepted that view with amplifications. They became greater than

any that had been. Save Death, who, in days that precede the fall of

empires, is the one divinity whom all fear and in whom all believe, they

alone were august. In the absence of the aromas of tradition, they had

something superior. The Olympians inspired awe, the Caesars fright. Death

was their servant. They ordered. Death obeyed. In the obedience was

apotheosis. In the apotheosis was the delirium that madmen know. At their

feet, Rome, mad as they, built them temples, raised them shrines, created

for them hierophants and flamens, all the phantasmagoria of the

megalomaniac Alexander, and, with it, a worship which they accepted as

their due perhaps, but in which their reason fled. That of Caesar withstood

it. Insanity began with Antony, who called himself Osiris. The brain of

Tiberius, very steady at first, was insufficiently strong to withstand the

nectar fumes. The latter intoxicated Caligula so sheerly that he invited

the moon to share his couch. Thereafter, the palace of the Caesars became a

vast court in which the wives and daughters of the nobility assisted at

perversions which a Ministry of Pleasure devised, and where Rome abandoned

whatever she had held holy, the innocence of girlhood, patrician pride,

everything, shame included.

In post-pagan convulsions there was much that was very vile. But there is

one aspect of evil which subsequent barbarism reproved, and in which Rome

delighted. It was the symbolized shapes of sin, open and public, for

which in modern speech there is no name, and which were then omnipresent,

sung in verse, exhibited on the stage, paraded in the streets, put on the

amulets that girls and matrons wore, put in the nursery, consecrated by

custom, art, religion, and since recovered from disinterred Pompeii. "The

mouth," said Quintillian, "does not dare describe what the eyes behold."

Rome that had made _orbs_ and _urbs_ synonymous was being conquered by the

turpitudes of the quelled.

"I have told of the Prince," said Suetonius, "I will tell now of the

Beast." It was his privilege. He wrote in Latin. In English it is not

possible. Gautier declared that the inexpressible does not exist. Even his

pen might have balked, had he tried it on the imperial orgy. The ulcer

that ravaged Sylla, gangrened a throne, and decomposed a world. Less

violent under Tiberius than under Caligula, under Nero the fever rose to

the brain and added delirium to it. In reading accounts of the epoch you

feel as though you were assisting at the spectacle of a gigantic asylum,

from which the keepers are gone, and of which the inmates are omnipotent.

But, in spite of the virulence of the virus, the athletic constitution of

the empire, joined to its native element of might, resisted the disease so

potently that one must assume that there was there a vitality which no

other people had had, a hardiness that enabled Rome to survive excesses in

which Nineveh and Babylon fainted. From the disease itself Rome might have

recovered. It was the delirium that brought her down. That delirium,

mounting always, increased under Commodus, heightened under Caracalla, and

reached its crisis in Heliogabalus. Thereafter, for a while it waned only

to flame again under Diocletian. The virus remained. To extirpate it the

earth had to produce new races. Already they were on their way.

Meanwhile, though there were reigns when, in the words of Tacitus, virtue

was a sentence of death, the emperors were not always insane. Vespasian

was a soldier, Hadrian a scholar, Pius Antoninus a philosopher, and Marcus

Aurelius a sage. Rome was not wholly pandemoniac. There is goodness

everywhere, even in evil. There was goodness even in Rome. Stoicism, a

code of the highest morality, had been adopted by the polite. Cicero, in

expounding it, had stated that no one could be a philosopher who has not

learned that vice should be avoided, however concealable it may be.

Aristotle had praised virtue because of its extreme utility. Seneca said

that vices were maladies, among which Zeno catalogued love, as Plato did

crime. To him, vice stood to virtue as disease does to health. All guilt,

he said, is ignorance.

Expressions such as these appealed to a class relatively small, but highly

lettered, whom the intense realism of the amphitheatre, the suggestive

postures of the pantomimes, and the Orientalism of the orgy shocked. There

are now honest men everywhere, even in prison. Even in Rome there were

honest men then. Moreover, paganism at its worst, always tolerant, was

often poetic. Then, too, life in the imperial epoch, while less fair than

in the age of Pericles, was so splendidly brilliant that it exhausted

possible glamour for a thousand years to come. Dazzling in violence, its

coruscations blinded the barbarians so thoroughly that thereafter there

was but night.

X

FINIS AMORIS

The first barbarian that invaded Rome was a Jew. There was then there a

small colony of Hebrews. Porters, pedlers, rag-pickers, valets-de-place,

they were the descendants mainly of former prisoners of war. The Jew had a

message for them. It was very significant. But it conflicted so entirely

with orthodox views that there were few whom it did not annoy. A

disturbance ensued. The ghetto was raided. A complaint for inciting

disorder was lodged against a certain Christos, of whom nothing was known,

and who had eluded arrest.

Rome, through her relations with Syria, was probably the first Occidental

city in which the name was pronounced. Though the message behind it

annoyed many, others accepted it at once. These latter, the former

denounced. Some suppression ensued. But it had no religious significance.

The purport of the message and the attitude of those who accepted it was

seditious. Both denied the divinity of the Caesars. That was treason. In

addition, they announced the approaching end of the world. That was a slur

on the optimism of State. A law was passed--_Non licet esse Christianos_.

None the less, they multiplied. The message that had been brought to Rome

was repeated throughout the Roman world. It crossed the frontiers. It

reached races of whom Rome had never heard. They came and peered at her.

Over the context of the message they drank hydromel to her fall.

The message, initially significant, dynamic at birth, developed under

multiplying hands into a force so disruptive that it shook the gods from

the skies, buried them beneath their ruined temples, and in derision

tossed after them their rites for shroud. In the convulsions a page of

history turned. The great book of paganism closed. Another opened. In it

was a new ideal of love.

Realization was not immediate. Entirely uncontemplated and equally

unforeseen, the ideal was an after-growth, a blossom among other ruins, a

flower that developed subtly with the Rosa mystica from higher shrines.

Meanwhile, the message persisted. Titularly an evangel, it meant good

news. The Christ had said to his disciples: "As ye go, preach, saying, The

Kingdom of God is at hand--for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have

gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come."

"All these things shall come upon this generation," were his subsequent

and explicit words. After the incident in the wilderness he declared: "The

time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand." Later he asserted:

"Verily I say unto you that there be some of them that stand by which

shall in no wise taste of death till they see the Kingdom of God come with

power."[23]

In repeating these tidings, the evangelists lived in a state of constant

expectation. Their watchword was "Maran atha"--the Lord cometh. In fancy

they saw themselves in immediate Edens, seated on immutable thrones.

The corner-stone of the early Church was based on that idea. When, later,

it was recognized as a misconception, the coming of the Kingdom of God was

interpreted as the establishment of the Christian creed.

Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion. He came to prepare men

not for life, but for death. He believed that the world was to end. Had he

not so believed, his condemnation of labor, his prohibition against

wealth, his injunction to forsake all things for his sake, his praise of

celibacy, his disregard of family ties, and his abasement of marriage

would be without meaning. Observance of his orders he regarded as a

necessary preparation for an event then assumed to be near. It was

exacted as a means of grace.

On the other hand, it may be that there was an esoteric doctrine which

only the more spiritual among the disciples received. The significant

threat, "In this life ye shall have tribulation," contains a distinct

suggestion of other views. Possibly they concerned less the termination of

the world than the termination of life. Life extinct, obviously there must

ensue that peace which passeth all understanding, the Pratscha-Paramita,

or beyond all knowledge, which long before had been taught by the Buddha,

in whose precepts it is not improbable that Jesus was versed.

To-day there are four gospels. Originally there were fifty. In some of

them succincter views may have been expressed. The possibility, surviving

texts support. These texts are provided by Clement of Alexandria. They are

quoted by him from the Gospel according to the Egyptians, an Evangel that

existed in the latter half of the second century and which was then

regarded as canonical. In one of them, Jesus said: "I am come to destroy

the work of woman, which is generation and death." In another, being asked

how long life shall continue, he answered: "So long as women bear

children."[24]

These passages seem conclusive. Even otherwise, the designed effect of

the exoteric doctrine was identical. It eliminated love and condemned the

sex. In the latter respect, Paul was particularly severe. In violent words

he humiliated woman. He enjoined on her silence and submission. He

reminded her that man was created in the image of God, while she was but

created for him. He declared that he who giveth her in marriage cloth

well, but he that giveth her not doth better.[25]

Theoretically, as well as canonically, marriage thereafter was regarded as

unholy. The only union in which it was held that grace could possibly be,

was one that in its perfect immaculacy was a negation of marriage itself.

St. Sebastian enjoined any other form. The injunction was subsequently

ratified. It was ecclesiastically adjudged that whoso declared marriage

preferable to celibacy be accursed.[26] St. Augustin, more leniently,

permitted marriage, on condition, however, that the married in no

circumstance overlooked the object of their union, which object was the

creation of children, _not to love them_, he added, but to increase the

number of the servants of the Lord.[27]

St. Augustin was considerate. But Jesus had been indulgent. In the

plentitudes of his charity there was both commiseration and forgiveness.

Throughout his entire ministry he wrote but once. It was on an occasion

when a woman was brought before him. Her accusers were impatient. Jesus

bent forward and with a finger wrote on the ground. The letters were

illegible. But the symbol of obliteration was in the dust which the wind

would disperse. The charge was impatiently repeated. Jesus straightened

himself. With the weary comprehension of one to whom hearts are as books,

he looked at them. "Whoever is without sin among you, may cast the first

stone."

The sins of Mary Magdalen were many. He forgave them, for she had loved

much. His indulgence was real and it was infinite. Yet occasionally his

severity was as great. At the marriage of Cana he said to his mother:

"Woman, what have I to do with thee?" In the house of the chief of the

Pharisees he more emphatically announced: "If any man come unto me and

hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and

sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Elsewhere

he advocated celibacy enforced with the knife. John, his favorite

disciple, beheld those who had practised it standing among the

redeemed.[28]

That vision peopled the deserts with hermits. It filled the bastilles of

God, the convents and monasteries of pre-mediaeval days. The theory of it

was adopted by kings on their thrones. Lovers in their betrothals engaged

to observe it reciprocally. Husbands and wives separated that they might

live more purely apart.

The theory, contrary to the spirit of paganism, was contrary also to that

of the Mosaic law. The necessity of marriage was one of the six hundred

and thirteen Hebraic precepts. The man who omitted to provide himself with

heirs became a homicide. In the Greek republics celibacy was penalized. In

Rome, during the republic, bachelors were taxed. Under the empire they

could neither inherit nor serve the State. But the law was evaded. Even

had it not been, the people of Rome, destroyed by war or as surely by

pleasure, little by little was disappearing. Slaves could not replace

citizens. The affranchised could be put in the army, even in the senate,

as they were, but that did not change their servility, and it was

precisely that servility which encouraged imperial aberrations and

welcomed those which Christianity brought.

The continence which the Church inculcated was not otherwise new. The

Persians had imposed it on girls consecrated to the worship of the Sun. It

was observed by the priests of Osiris. It was the cardinal virtue of the

Pythagoreans. It was exacted of Hellenic hierophants. Gaul had her

druidesses and Rome her vestals. Celibacy existed, therefore, before

Christianity did. But it was exceptional in addition to being not very

rigorously enforced. Vesta was a mother. All the vestals that faltered

were not buried alive. There was gossip, though it be but legend, of the

druidesses, of the muses as well. Immaculacy was the ideal condition of

the ideal gods. Zeus materially engendered material divinities that

presided over forces and forms. But, without concurrence, there issued

armed and adult from his brain the wise and immaculate Pallas.

Like her and the muses, genius was assumed to be ascetic also. Socrates

thought otherwise. His punishment was Xantippe, and not a line to his

credit. A married Homer is an anomaly which imagination cannot comfortably

conjure. A married Plato is another. Philosophers and poets generally were

single. Lucretius, Vergil, and the triumvirs of love were unmarried. In

the epoch in which they appeared Rome was aristocratically indisposed to

matrimony. To its pomps there was a dislike so pronounced that Augustus

introduced coercive laws. Hypocrite though he were, he foresaw the dangers

otherwise resulting. It was these that asceticism evoked.

The better part of the tenets of the early Church--sobriety, stoicism,

the theory of future reward and punishment, pagan philosophy professed.

Adherents could, therefore, have been readily recruited. But the doctrine

of asceticism and, with it, the abnegation of whatever Rome loved,

angered, creating first calumny, then persecution.

Infanticide at the time was very common. To accuse the Christians of it

would have meant nothing. They were charged instead with eating the

children that they killed. That being insufficient they were further

charged with the united abominations of OEdipus and Thyestes.[29]

Thereafter, if the Tiber mounted or the Nile did not, if it rained too

heavily or not enough, were there famine, earthquakes, pests, the fault

was theirs. Then, through the streets, a cry resounded, _Christianos ad

leonem!_--to the arena with them. At any consular delay the mob had its

torches and tortures. Persecution augumented devotion. "Fast," said

Tertullian. "Fasting prepares for martyrdom. But do not marry, do not bear

children. You would only leave them to the executioner. Garment yourselves

simply, the robes the angels bring are robes of death."

The robes did not always come, the executioner did not, either. The

Kingdom of God delayed. The world persisted. So also did asceticism.

Clement and Hermas unite in testifying that the immaculacy of the single

never varied during an epoch when even that of the vestals did, and that

the love of the married was the more tender because of the immaterial

relations observed.[30] Gregoire de Tours cited subsequently an instance

in which a bride stipulated for a union of this kind. Her husband agreed.

Many years later she died. Her husband, while preparing her for the grave,

openly and solemnly declared that he restored her to God as immaculate as

she came. "At which," the historian added, "the dead woman smiled and

said, 'Why do you tell what no one asked you.'"

The subtlety of the question pleased the Church. The Church liked to

compare the Christian to an athlete struggling in silence with the world,

the flesh, and the devil. It liked to regard him as one whose life was a

continual exercise in purification. It liked to represent his celibacy as

an imitation of the angels. At that period Christianity took things

literally and narrowly. Paul had spoken eloquently on the dignity of

marriage. He authorized and honored it. He permitted and even counselled

second marriages. But his pre-eminent praise of asceticism was alone

considered. Celibacy became the ideal of the early Christians who

necessarily avoided the Forum and whatever else was usual and Roman. It is

not, therefore, very surprising that they should have been defined as

enemies of gods, emperors, laws, customs, nature itself, or, more briefly,

as barbarians.

Yet there were others. At the north and at the west they prowled,

nourished in hatred of Rome, in wonder, too, of the effeminate and

splendid city with its litters of gold, its baths of perfume, its

inhabitants dressed in gauze, and its sway from the Indus to Britannia.

From the day when a mass of them stumbled on Marius to the hour when

Alaric laughed from beneath the walls his derision at imperial might,

always they had wondered and hated.

In the slaking of the hate Christianity perhaps unintentionally assisted.

The Master had said, "All they that take the sword shall perish by the

sword." His believers omitted to do either. When enrolled, they deserted.

On the frontiers they refused to fight. The path of the barbarians was

easy. In disorganized hordes they battened on Rome and melted away there

in excesses. Tacitus and Salvian rather flattered them. They were neither

intelligent or noble. They must have lacked even the sense of

independence. They pulled civilization down, but they fell with it--into

serfdom.

Already from the steppes of Tartary had issued cyclones of Huns. Painted

blue, wrapped in cloaks of human skin, it was thought that they were the

whelps of demons. Their chief was Attila. The whirlwind that he loosed

swept the world like a broom. In the echoes of his passage is the crash of

falling cities, the cries of the vanquished, the death rattle of nations,

the surge and roar of seas of blood. In the reverberations Attila looms,

dragging the desert after him, tossing it like a pall on the face of the

earth. "But who are you?" a startled prelate gasped. Said Attila, "I am

the Scourge of God."

Satiated at last, overburdened with the booty of the world, he galloped

back to his lair where, on his wedding couch, another Judith killed him.

In spite of him, in spite of preceding Goths and subsequent Vandals, Rome,

unlike her gods that had fled the skies, was immortal. She could fall, but

she could not die. But though she survived, antiquity was dead. It

departed with the lords of the ghostland.

HISTORIA AMORIS

_Part Two_

PART II

I

THE CLOISTER AND THE HEART

In the making of the world that was Rome, ages combined. Centuries

unrolled in its dissolution. Step by step it had ascended the path of

empire, step by step it went down. The descent completed, Rome herself

survived. The eternal feminine is not more everlasting than the Eternal

City. Yet, in the descent, her power, wrested from a people who had but

the infirmities of corruption, by others that had only the instincts of

brutes, left but vices and ruins. From these feudalism and serfdom

erupted. Humanity became divided into beasts of burden and beasts of prey.

Feudalism was the transmission of authority from an overlord to an

underlord, from the latter to a retainer, and thence down to the lowest

rung of the social ladder, beneath which was the serf, between whom and

his master the one judge was God.

The resulting conditions have no parallel in any epoch of which history

has cognizance. Except in Byzance, the glittering seat of Rome's surviving

dominion, and in Islam, the glowing empire further east, nowhere was there

light. Europe, pitch-black, became, almost in its entirety, subject to the

caprices of a hierarchy of despots who managed to be both stupid and

fierce, absolute autocrats, practically kings. To the suzerain they owed

homage at court, assistance in war; but in their own baronies, all power,

whether military, judiciary, or legislative, centred in them. They had the

further prerogative, which they abundantly abused, of maintaining

centuries of anarchy and intellectual night. The fief and the sword were

the investiture of their power. The donjon--a pillory on one side, a

gibbet on the other--was the symbol of their might. The blazon, with its

sanguinary and fabulous beasts, was emblematic of themselves. Could wolves

form a social order, their model would be that of these brutes, to whom

God was but a bigger tyrant. Their personal interest, which alone

prevented them from exterminating everybody, was the determining cause of

affranchisement when it came, and, when it did, was accompanied by

conditions always hard, often grotesque, and usually vile, among which was

the _jus primae noctis_ and the affiliated _marchetum_, subsequently

termed droit du seigneur, the dual right of poaching on maidenly and

marital preserves.[31]

With that, with drink and pillage for relaxations, the chief business of

the barons was war. When they descended from their keeps, it was to rob

and attack. There was no security, not a road was safe, war was an

intermittent fever and existence a panic.

In the constant assault and sack of burgs and keeps, the condition of

woman was perilous. Usually she was shut away more securely and remotely

than in the gynaeceum. If, to the detriment of her lord, she emerged, she

might have one of her lips cut off, both perhaps, or, more expeditiously,

be murdered. She never knew which beforehand. It was as it pleased him.

Penalties of this high-handedness were not sanctioned by law. There was

none. It was the right of might. Civilization outwearied had lapsed back

into eras in which women were things.

The lapse had ecclesiastical approbation. At the second council of Macon

it was debated whether woman should not be regarded as beyond the pale of

humanity and as appertaining to a degree intermediary between man and

beast. Subsequent councils put her outside of humanity also, but on a

plane between angels and man. But in the capitularies generally it was as

_Vas infirmius_ that she was defined. Yet already Chrysostom, with a

better appreciation of the value of words, with a better appreciation of

the value of woman as well, had defined her as danger in its most

delectable form. Chrysostom means golden mouth. His views are of interest.

Those of the mediaeval lord are not recorded, and would not be citable, if

they were.

From manners such as his and from times such as those, there was but one

refuge--the cloister, though there was also the tomb. They were not always

dissimilar. In the monasteries, there was a thick vapor of crapulence and

bad dreams. They were vestibules of hell. The bishops, frankly barbarian,

coarse, gluttonous, and worse, went about armed, pillaging as freely as

the barons. Monks less adventurous, but not on that account any better,

saw Satan calling gayly at them, "Thou art damned." Yet, however drear

their life, it was a surcease from the apoplexy of the epoch. Kings

descended from their thrones to join them. To the abbeys and priories came

women of rank.

In these latter retreats there was some suavity, but chiefly there was

security from predatory incursions, from husbands quite as unwelcome,

from the passions and violence of the turbulent world without. But the

security was not over-secure. Women that escaped behind the bars, saw

those bars shaken by the men from whom they had fled, saw the bars sunder,

and themselves torn away. That, though, was exceptional. In the cloister

generally there was safety, but there were also regrets, and, with them, a

leisure not always very adequately filled. To some, the cloister was but

another form of captivity in which they were put not of their own

volition, but by way of precaution, to insure a security which may not

have been entirely to their wish. Yet, from whatever cause existence in

these retreats was induced, very rapidly it became the fashion.

There had been epochs in which women wore garments that were brief, there

were others in which their robes were long. It was a question of mode.

Then haircloth came in fashion. In Greece, women were nominally free. In

Rome, they were unrestrained. In Europe at this period, they were

cloistered. It was the proper thing, a distinction that lifted them above

the vulgar. Bertheflede, a lady of very exalted position, who, Gregoire de

Tours has related, cared much for the pleasures of the table and not at

all for the service of God, entered a nunnery for no other reason.